The Capitalocene is a critical alternative to the concept of the Anthropocene, conceived to replace it. The article discusses the reasons why scholars from the social sciences and the humanities defend this alternative version of the “human epoch”, and dismiss the narrative that comes with the Anthropocene. This terminological quarrel expresses a tension between two postures that are frequently expressed in political and academic debates on environmental issues.

The current breakdown in the relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world is evident in the crisis of anthropogenic climate change. This critical situation has prompted intellectuals to think through a proper name for our contemporary era. Some opt for the “Anthropocene,” the era of humans, which highlights the uniquely human role in planetary destruction. Others prefer the “Capitalocene” to emphasize capitalism’s role in the crisis. Still others argue that our era is marked by an age (...) of information, which the author labels the “Pliroforicene” since pliroforia roughly means “information” in ancient Greek. Having discussed the pros and cons of these labels, the author discusses conscious rebellions against the Capitalocene and the Pliroforicene through the lenses of the work of sociologist Erik Olin Wright and philosopher Richard Polt. The author then argues that Martin Heidegger’s concept of Gelassenheit, which is defined as a comportment towards beings in which one is open to the ways in which they reveal themselves as they are rather than subsuming them into one’s own interests, may prove to play a crucial role in our contemporary era, regardless of what we call it since it allows us to respect the integrity of things. (shrink)

Kluczowy kontekst artykułu stanowi najnowsza wiedza dotycząca powagi planetarnego kryzysu środowiskowego i jego reperkusji społeczno-gospodarczych (kompromitacja kapitalizmu paliw kopalnych i nierówności). Na tym tle teoretycznym zostaną ze sobą krytycznie porównane trzy ujęcia. Chodzi o filozofię Herberta Marcusego, krytykę tzw. „tanich natur” i kapitałocenu Jasona W. Moore’a oraz o ekonomię ekologiczną wystudzania wzrostu. Wszystkie z nich to postkapitalistyczne eko-utopie budowane w obliczu troski o samo przetrwanie cywilizacji. Tekst poszukuje antycypacji myśli Moore’a i idei ekonomistów ekologicznych w refleksji Marcusego na temat ekologii. (...) Wskazane zostaną ważne podobieństwa, jak i wybrane różnice między wymienionymi wyżej koncepcjami. Artykuł rozpatruje przy tym dwa poziomy: diagnozy dotyczącej problemów rozwiniętego społeczeństwa przemysłowego oraz możliwej, systemowej oraz konstruktywnej korekty. Tekst przekonuje, że istnienie konkretnych ujęć ekonomii ekologicznej dewzrostu, dobrobytu i redystrybucji przeczy tezie Marcusego o tym, że kapitalizm całkowicie kolonizuje ludzką wyobraźnię. (shrink)

In their seminal work, Dialectics of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno interpreted capitalism as the irrational monetization of nature. In the present work, I analyze three 21st century concepts, Anthropocene, Capitalocene and Machinocene, in light of Horkheimer and Adorno’s arguments and recent arguments from the philosophy of biology. The analysis reveals a remarkable prescience of the term “instrumental reason”, which is present in each of the three concepts in a profound and cryptic way. In my interpretation, the term describes the (...) propensity of science based on the notion of physicalism to interpret nature as the machine analyzable and programmable by the human reason. As a result, the Anthropocene concept is built around the mechanicist model, which may be presented as the metaphor of the car without brakes. In a similar fashion, the Machinocene concept predicts the emergence of the mechanical mind, which will dominate nature in the near future. Finally, the Capitalocene concept turns a perfectly rational ambition to expand knowledge into an irrational obsession with over-knowledge, by employing the institutionalized science as the engine of capitalism without brakes. The common denominator of all three concepts is the irrational propensity to legitimize self-destruction. Potential avenues for countering the effects of “instrumental reason” are suggested. (shrink)

During the COVIDicine, many nurses awoke to the ways that the Healthcare‐Industrial Complex (HIC) dictates the care we are able to provide. Using the Foucauldian concepts of pastoral power and governmentality, we explore the ways that nurses participate in upholding power structures within the HIC and reproducing them in our work, contributing to a carceral culture based on hierarchy and power dynamics. We also explore the ways nurses are both agentic in this system and subject to it, reluctant to make (...) waves and lose our place within a system that can offer nurses safety and security in, and most importantly, a paycheck. This paper articulates a prefigurative anarchist approach to nursing praxis. Through the writing of Emma Goldman, we locate a historically founded philosophical basis for practical tactics that nurses can use to actualise this praxis. Both individually and as a collective, nurses can assert their own ethic and power through direct action, micro‐insurgency and solidarity to build the world we know can be. Our only limitation is our imagination. (shrink)

This article responds to the transdisciplinary call launched by Petrilli and Ponzio for the creation and implementation of semioethical virtue ethics that has become a categorical imperative in the Anthropocene/Capitalocene. In an era in which the sign systems upon which all life depends are on the brink of collapse, Petrilli and Ponzio break new ground with the promulgation of a type of alterity-based humanism. As semiotic animals endowed with metasemiosic faculties, they insist that we must urgently cultivate the kind (...) of virtues that take into consideration the Cosmic Other in order to stem the tide of the anthropogenic crisis. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In the introduction to the 2015 reprint of her classical Partial Visions, Angelika Bammer cites the pithy injunction of the American poet and feminist thinker Adrienne Rich: “We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth … the visions, and the thinking necessary to sustain, console, and alter human existence. … Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy (...) will develop new meaning; thinking itself will be transformed.” Based on sustaining, consoling, and radically altering the present dire state of human existence, the author leads to two sets of initial arguments: Where Are We, and What Are We Doing Wrong. What follows are samples of possible answers, perhaps representative beyond themselves. (shrink)

This is the transcript of a written exchange that Robin Celikates and Matthias Fritsch carried out between November 2024 and March 2025. We focus the conversation on civil disobedience in response to climate change and in the context of massive global and intergenerational injustices. We discuss climate disobedience as a paradigm case of the politicizing and democratizing force that civil disobedience can be in response to wide-spread entrenched and often invisibilized forms of domination and depoliticization. Drawing on critical rather than (...) ideal theory, we pay special attention to the role disobedience plays in accounts of radical democracy and in relation to ecological destabilization. (shrink)

This chapter examines the current assault on nature as coming from two different fronts: On the one hand, it comes from the hypermodern camp, that is, from those who celebrate the Anthropocene as the apex of human mastery and domination over nature (‘good Anthropocene’ scenario), the ‘techno-optimists’ who are willing to (re)engineer/recreate the earth, and the neo-greens who wish to see the growth-based economy and the technological colonization of the planet continue, even if the cost is the disappearance of life-sustaining (...) ecosystems. On the other hand, the assault on nature stems from postmodern techno-theorists, renamed for our purpose ‘most-moderns,’ who, relying on the concept of ‘technonatures,’ contend a hybridist ontology which eventually justifies the de/reconstruction (read: destruction) of the planet under the rule of technoscience and capitalism. The latter narrative does not only acknowledge that nature has ended as an independent force because of human’s growing techno-scientific power on Earth: It extrapolates, from the history of humanization, that nature as an ontological reality was somehow always already ‘dead,’ and that the idea of a ‘nature out there’ is, therefore, intrinsically flawed. This chapter contends that both hypermodernists and techno-postmodernists are trapped in modernity’s failures, i.e., in the dream of a technological appropriation of nature, as well as in the binary modes of thinking they denounce (cf. separation nature/culture) that have contributed to creating the ecological predicament itself. Against those views, it shows that the natural world is not an inert matter amenable to all sorts of transformations but rather an ‘uncooperative beast’ which rebels against human manipulations and expresses its ‘revolt’ to human attempts of control in the form of eco-catastrophes—what has been designated in this chapter as ‘the return of nature’ in the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Ours are Days of Decision and it's indispensable to transform our technics. For it, we must abandon the inherited conception of technics based on neutrality and autonomy. To this end, in this article we develop a socio-historical ontology for technics that argues: (a) To understand technics we have to take into consideration technical objects, handling, and the degree of guidance of the animal user. (b) Each technics is inseparable from its society. (c) The idea of a free use of technics (...) is illusory. There are always unexpected impacts and various uses of a given technics. (d) Technologies of the Capitalocene are imperial. (e) Technologies have acquired a destructive inertia and we have the obligation to understand technological development as a political phenomenon. (f) In order to go beyond the Capitalocene and advance towards Degrowth, we have to move from imperial technologies to humble technics. (shrink)

Stimulated by our conversations at the 2018 International Philosophy of Nursing Society Conference and our shared interests, the coauthors present an argument for augmenting the broader discussion of “missed care” with our synthesized concept called structural missingness. We take the problem of missed care to be largely grounded on a particular economic construction of the healthcare system within an era of what some are calling the Capitalocene, capturing the pervasive influence of capitalism on nature, humanity and the world order. (...) Our perspective is that of the United States, however, extrapolations can be made to the social and healthcare systems in other countries. We are concerned with the underlying conditions that structurally reify inequality and ultimately undermine nursing practice. To situate the discussion, we briefly review existing literature on the contextualization of missed care. We understand contemporary circumstances of missed care as a function of the neoliberalization of healthcare, including the idea of nursing as a commodity. From this, we discuss the implications of missed care, which forms the basis of our critique. Synthesizing the term “structural missingness, we locate a moral imperative in the professional and disciplinary commitments of nursing to consider who and what have been left out. This moral imperative for the nursing profession, along with other social and health related professions, underscores our obligation to be involved in uncovering inequities and conceptualizing upstream solutions for structural missingness. (shrink)

If art, science, and the humanities have shared one thing, it was their common engagement with constructions and representations of the human. Under the pressure of new contemporary concerns, however, we are experiencing a “posthuman condition”; the combination of new developments-such as the neoliberal economics of global capitalism, migration, technological advances, environmental destruction on a mass scale, the perpetual war on terror and extensive security systems- with a troublesome reiteration of old, unresolved problems that mean the concept of the human (...) as we had previously known it has undergone dramatic transformations. The Posthuman Glossary is a volume providing an outline of the critical terms of posthumanity in present-day artistic and intellectual work. It builds on the broad thematic topics of Anthropocene/Capitalocene, eco-sophies, digital activism, algorithmic cultures and security and the inhuman. It outlines potential artistic, intellectual, and activist itineraries of working through the complex reality of the 'posthuman condition', and creates an understanding of the altered meanings of art vis-à-vis critical present-day developments. It bridges missing links across disciplines, terminologies, constituencies and critical communities. This original work will unlock the terms of the posthuman for students and researchers alike. (shrink)

Nursing's efforts at organizing in the United States have encompassed various approaches to creating change at a systemic and political level, namely shared governance, professional associations, and nurse unions. The United States is currently experiencing the effects of an authoritarian sociopolitical agenda that has taken aim at our profession's ethic of providing equitable care for all people through legislation that bans gender‐affirming care and abortions. Nursing is simultaneously experiencing a crisis of burnout and moral distress, as we navigate the everyday (...) functions of a for‐profit healthcare system under the Capitalocene. As we situate ourselves within these policies and practices of late‐stage capitalism and an increasingly authoritarian nation‐state, we are compelled to think deeply about how nursing is currently organizing ourselves. Our paper will explore the evolution of various forms of organizing through the lens of intersectionality, which offers a framework for considering the ways that power operates, creating a matrix of sociostructural processes that fuel injustice. Intersectionality also compels us to examine whether our organizing has resisted, or perpetuated, a matrix of oppression. We will conclude by offering examples of radical imagining for a future of nursing resistance, where our collective organizing has a greater impact and responsibility for dismantling the status quo to achieve justice and liberation. (shrink)

Eco-Marxism presents a debate between two theoretical schools: metabolic rift theory, developed by John Foster and others, and world-ecology, proposed by Jason W. Moore. The debate refers ultimately to ontology, more precisely to the relation between society and nature. Critical realism plays a central role as the philosophical underlabouring for metabolic rift theory and has implications regarding the Anthropocene/Capitalocene debate as well. Reviewing the debate through CR categories provides clarity about the specifically social character of the causes of ecological (...) disruptions. Using CR, metabolic rift theorists could explain the interdisciplinary character of their analyses. By distinguishing between real transfactual mechanisms and their actual interaction in open systems, I intend to show that neither metabolic rift theory, nor its interdisciplinary approach to the Anthropocene, involve Cartesian Dualism, as Moore claims. World-Ecology provides an alternative historical account of capitalism's environmental history, but it does not critically replace metabolic rift theory. (shrink)

Whether we are said to be living in the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, or are witnessing the start of the Chthulucene, as feminist science studies scholar Donna J. Haraway (2016) would describe the current post-anthropocentric era, there is a demonstratable need for affective, entangled, transversal forms of thinking-doing today. Writing this editorial almost a year after the COVID-19 pandemic erupted, and that as inhabitants of Belgium and South Africa—countries with complex ongoing capitalist-colonial legacies, socio-political presents, and heavily but also differently (...) hit by said pandemic—we more than ever feel that these are times of entwined crisis, chaos, and hardship, overflowing with cravings for pedagogical-philosophical responses that are affirmative, productive, and future-oriented. Reactions that are moreover part theory, part praxis, counter the nihilistic, and are future-focused while still grounded in the present, as to not defer responsibilities to future times (see Geerts & Carstens, 2019). (shrink)

Drawing on an empirically engaged philosophical approach, this paper interrogates moral parochialism in students’ ethical reasoning as a critical challenge for education in the Capitalocene. Through a dialogic interplay between theory and empirical data from an ethnographic study, it illustrates how students’ ethical responses to socioecological dilemmas were often shaped by spatial, emotional, and relational proximity. Situating these findings within continental feminist ethics and relational ontologies, I argue for a shift toward moral cosmopolitanism – a universal ethical orientation grounded (...) in collective responsibility and respect for difference. To support such a shift, I propose pedagogies of precarity: pedagogical practices that expose structural violence, center vulnerability, and cultivate phronesis. These pedagogies aim not only to disrupt the sanitized optimism of mainstream schooling but to reposition ethical literacy as integral to learning and citizenship. The paper further contends that moral cosmopolitanism must move beyond liberal-humanist framings toward an insurgent cosmopolitanism of the South – one attentive to colonial legacies, material inequities, and the epistemologies of those living in precarity. By integrating difficult knowledge, fostering radical solidarity, and nurturing docta spes – educated hope – educators can support students in developing ethical subjectivities capable of responding to the complexities of an interdependent, precarious world. (shrink)

Within the context of the Capitalocene the essay examines the term “aesthetics” first, by considering its rather generalised contemporary applications and how such broad-brush meaning betrays a complex and sophisticated human faculty with the capacity to organise and trigger a vast array of emotive and intellectual response. The essay portrays aesthetics within the production of art as a means of sensitisation and explores how the careful consideration and strategic application of aesthetic choices in this way can play an important (...) role as a tool for change in environmental awakening and behaviours. We reflect broadly on how aesthetic tuning has been utilised as a constructively disruptive mechanism, historically for example, in surrealist practices and demonstrate how conscious and subconsciously inflected decision making in art production today might be put to use to determine or inflect the responses of audiences in respect of environmental imperatives. In the second half of the essay, the author/artists focus specifically on the example of their 2019-21 project and exhibition Visitations to explore in greater depth the deployment of aesthetic decisions and their intended effects in the research, the making and presentation of individual works and their combined resonance in the context of their award-winning installation in Akureyri Art Museum (September 2021-January 2022). (shrink)

This article sets out to draft a preliminary sketch of an environmental history of photography, as opposed to a history of environmental photography. It shows that such a history should be rooted in a conceptualization of our geological epoch as the Capitalocene: the age of capital. Seen in this light, photography can be understood as part of a longer history of what the article describes – building on the work of activist and journalist Raj Patel and environmental historian Jason (...) W. Moore (2018) – as the ‘cheap image’. In this way, photography is shown to offer a succinct expression of the Cartesian dualism that Patel and Moore see as being at the heart of the Capitalocene: the externalized image of capital N nature that this world ecology necessitated. The article considers Mining Photography: The Ecological Footprint of Image Production (Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, 2022) a recent exhibition and catalogue that attempted to narrate in exhibition form a history of photography from such a perspective. Finally, it concludes with a discussion of the work of several artists from this exhibition who are seen as exemplifying ‘metabolic realism’, a new critical photo-based artistic approach. (shrink)

For Bernard Stiegler ‘the question of philosophy is first of all that of action’ (p.7). By extending this statement to philosophy of education, I consider the possibilities of action in education in responding to the conditions of the contemporary. These conditions, which have come to be discussed and dissected with reference to such terms as Anthropocene (Stoermer, Crutzen), Capitalocene (Moore), Plantationocene (Haraway), hold unprecedented and mostly devastating consequences for all life. To consider possibilities for action within the field of (...) education to the conditions of the contemporary, I read Walter Mignolo’s concept of the colonial wound together with Gilles Deleuze’s conceptualisation of the wound. Based on this reading, I argue for the conditions of the contemporary to be understood as a wound in both Mignolo’s and Deleuze’s sense. Conceptualising it as such in turn allows me to ask how we might counter-actualise the wounds of the contemporary. In other words, how might we be worthy of the wound-event and respond in an affirmative yet critical manner to it within the field of education, and in so doing generate new possibilities of (educational) life. To consider what one such possibility of counter-actualisation might entail, I propose that education be informed by the notion of incompleteness, as expressed in the concept of conviviality. I conclude by reflecting on implications of counter-actualising the wound of the contemporary in relation to education if we were to activate the concepts of incompleteness and conviviality and pursue a different aesthetics of (educational) life. (shrink)

The article discusses the dynamics of currencies, of media of exchange in a perspective of longue durée. It explores the concept of ›toxic media‹ and of an ›ecology of practices‹ by tracing discussions on cacao as money and as consumable since the 15th century. Furthermore, historically specifi c versions of general purpose money, such as the Spanish Silver-Peso and the U.S. dollar are compared with to self-restricting currencies: currencies that are more tightly knit into the »web of life« ( Jason (...) Moore), into local economies and ecologies and into cultural systems. The article determines toxic effects of generalized media of exchange in the Capitalocene and discusses the interplay of situated money-regimes with generalized, globalized media of exchange. (shrink)

This article takes inspiration from Allan Sekula’s remarks on New Topographics photography, as well as his own ‘geography lessons’, to interrogate how photographs of ‘man-altered landscapes’ give visual form to the problems of temporality, natural history and historical agency that mark life in the Capitalocene. It proposes that combining Fredric Jameson’s analysis of the way that capital congeals ‘quantities of the past’ into dead labour with Andreas Malm’s diagnosis of our ‘warming condition’ allows us both to diagnose and counter (...) the temptation to a sublime inhumanity that so often haunts contemporary panoramas of ecological devastation. (shrink)

Exosomatic memory is a crucial phase in the evolution of humanity because it enables learning to take place across groups and generations rather than exclusively through lived experience or one on one transmission. Exosomatic memory is the attribution of knowledge to objects, such as art or writing, which allows epistemology to be transmitted beyond the individual to subsequent generations of people. Exosomatic memory is the key to the transmission of culture and knowledge, beyond the individual who learns exclusively from personal (...) experience. This places technologies such as writing and art in a key position for the education of culture and knowledge. Stiegler develops these ideas, following Martin Heidegger, Leroi-Gourhan and Derrida from the Palaeolithic to the contemporary. Maori use of natural objects as exosomatic transmission of intergenerational learning exceeds the technological enframing of modernity outlined by Heidegger. For indigenous peoples, exosomatic memory is cultural, technological and ecological. Stiegler argues that the impact of cybernetics on knowledge production is accelerating the technological enframing of knowledge (2018). Consequently, information technologies are leaving the human mind behind, in passive receptivity rather than dynamic creativity. The prefrontal cortex is slower than the internet, exacerbating a widening lag in active understanding, in favour of passive absorption. Alienation and epistemological entropy are trapping us in climate change and the anthropocentric Capitalocene. Maori insight may cut the Gordian knot and sidestep the alienation and determinism of technological modernity. (shrink)

The effects of humankind during the Capitalocene period caused planetary changes that resulted in the devastation and destruction of the Earth. The nuclear tragedy at the Chornobyl NPP on April 26, 1986, should serve as a constant reminder to society as it provided an example of dysfunctional totalitarian management. The topic of Chornobyl has become socially tiresome in recent years due to the trivialization of this large-scale anthropogenic, ecological, economic, and humanitarian disaster. The image of Ukraine as a hazard (...) area has gradually been replaced in world consciousness. When Russia, the aggressor country, started to intimidate the world with nuclear and thermonuclear weapons and to take the nuclear power plants in Ukraine under fire, the danger of radioactive materials came up once again. Phosphorous ammunition used in Ukraine in 2022 demonstrates that the terrorist state is capable of anything. Scientists also relate to earthquake motions that occurred in Turkey in February 2023 and Japan in January 2024, with the displacement of continental plates of the Earth’s crust resulting from missile attacks at the surface of the Earth. In the 21st century, there was a need to reconsider and refresh memories as well as to reread the works under a new perspective to draw attention to crimes against the safety of humanity and the environment, as well as to popularize, preserve and pass historical knowledge to future generations to protect them from traumatic experiences and self-destruction. The article aims to look at the postcolonial environment in contemporary literature of fact through the spectacle of ecocritical discourse via reading the works on the Chornobyl disaster. The objects of the study are Galia Ackerman’s work “Crossing Chornobyl”, the documentary and publicist chapter “Chornobyl Scenario” from the novel “Non-format Journalism” by Hryhorii Krymchuk, Volodymyr Shovkoshytnyi’s semidocumentary short story “Chornobyl: I Saw It”, the chapter “Elon Musk, “Tesla”, and Nuclear Power Engineering” from Maks Kidruk’s popular scientific book “Theory of Improbability”, Oleksii Radynskyi’s literary report “Chornobyl Is Ukraine”, and Markiian Kamysh’s travelogue “Stalking the Atomic City”. Study methods include principles of science, objectivity, and source verification. General scientific and special scientific research methods used in the study are a descriptive method for synthesizing and systematizing selected material; comparative and typological methods involving the elements of cultural, comparative, and narrative studies to compare the ways various authors have covered the Chornobyl topic; an ecocritical method that has made it possible to apply naturecentric approach to conceptualizing interaction between a human and nature to develop eco-conscious society; a postcolonial method aimed at conceptualizing the consequences of colonial rule via non-fiction text. (shrink)

Narratives of the anthropogenic environmental crisis (Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene) are driven by the same structural logic: they all locate the theoretical origins of the environmental crisis in an improper relationship between a class of human subjects and ‘natural’ objects. Some scholars like Latour attempt to use Schmitt’s political thought to address this dualism and build an emancipatory political framework. However, I argue that this project is necessarily doomed to failure because Schmitt’s political and legal thought, once plugged into the (...) eschatological character of the environmental crisis, cannot escape his authoritarian political theology. Arguments that try to detach Schmitt from his authoritarian and apocalypse-withholding katechon fail because the internal logics of Schmitt’s thought always drive towards state consolidation and internal homogenization in the face of existential crisis. Therefore, I argue that Schmitt’s thought cannot be used for an emancipatory politics in the context of the environmental crisis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionAnthropocene Feminisms: Rethinking the UnthinkableClaire Colebrook and Jami WeinsteinIn her recent lecture on the Anthropocene (to which she adds the Capitalocene and the Chthulucene), Donna Haraway expresses some alarm that after two major insights into what counts as thinkable, it was “anthropos” that became the term for the post-Holocene (Haraway 2014). Haraway declares, with emphasis, that it is “literally unthinkable” to work with the individual unit of “man” (...) if one is to do good intellectual work. For Haraway, the two knowledge events that ought to have precluded the use of the figure of the “anthropos” are: first, the acceptance that any seeming individual is the outcome of a series of complex relations and must be studied as such (so there would be no epoch with anything, let alone “man,” as its first cause), and, second, intellectual inquiry has acknowledged a general becoming-with, such that in order to be anything at all, “one” must be in a dynamic relation. Haraway’s work is exemplary of post-liberal feminist resistance to the figure of man—as subject, agent, and center of knowing. Terms like “Woman” or “the feminine” do not extend the field occupied by man; they instead create a different intensity. So when Haraway questions the “anthropos” of the Anthropocene she neither asks that women, too, be included in those who have scarred the planet, nor does she claim that “Woman” would occupy some innocent outside. Instead, she proposes that one think of the “anthropos” as untimely, as out of sync with an intellectual milieu that theorizes the death of the subject and the eclipse of the human, and has even begun to renounce the notion of life in itself. It is odd that in the face of this destruction of any possibility of thinking by [End Page 167] way of individualism, the epic gesture of the present deploys the figure of the “anthropos,” as it should be unthinkable today to return to the figure of man.When Haraway invokes what is literally unthinkable, and then gestures to the Anthropocene, she suggests that perhaps the figure of the Anthropocene is a form of unthinking, and that it is precisely when complexities, timescales, predictions, manageability, and any form of sustainability ought to disturb and trouble our logics that we cease to think and ask for a single cause for an entire epoch. If this is so, and the “anthropos” of the Anthropocene is a reaction formation, then we might see the skirmishes and turf wars that surround the golden spike1 as diversions. If we spend our time disputing just when it was that man started to change the planet, then we allow a contested point in time to pass itself off as thinking, all the while allowing the intensive multiplicity of what has come to be known as the Anthropocene to remain unthought. By asking when the Anthropocene began, we revive a modified version of the time of man; once again, man is placed as the agent of history, albeit unwittingly, and he can look back upon and assess the past of his own making. Haraway is not alone in suggesting that such conceptions of a single line of time, and a conception of first cause, are highly gendered and racialized. The figure of “man” who creates his own history and recognizes himself as having come into being through a time that is readable is bound up with hegemonic conceptions of modernity, and has long been the target of feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial critique (e.g., Foucault 1970; Amin 1989; Grosz 2004). If it is literally unthinkable to do good work from the premises of a methodological individualism, then asking who or what caused the Anthropocene, or when it began, would amount to a form of un-thinking or not-thinking. At the same time, perhaps the Anthropocene is literally unthinkable in a sense that marks a more positive and profound absurdity. Let us accept, following Haraway, that all “good work” both acknowledges the impossibility of accounting for the complexity of life by way of bounded, individual singularity, and dispenses with the exceptional man of reason as its foundation. If we do, what the Anthropocene... (shrink)

The paper relates to concepts of vulnerability and the Anthropocene. Starting from anthropological vulnerability, different dimensions of inequality of ecological vulnerability and nature itself are considered. Then it addresses, competing concepts such as the Capitalocene and Chthulucene, which are closely related to concepts of vulnerability. The paper concludes with perspectives on education for sustainability.

The crisis and the changes discussed in this book are not only environmental, but also socio-environmental: as humans, we are part of this crisis and responsible actors for finding possible solutions. We appear to live in a catastrophic era, better characterized as Capitalocene than Anthropocene, where unregulated capitalism, directly or indirectly, refuses its role to face the deep socio-environmental crisis. Although the diagnoses of the problems are well known, there is a lack of leadership regarding the establishment of a (...) world comprehensive map-road, which could lead not only to deal with the different crisis more efficiently, but also to involve people more directly in the decisional processes. In this regard, leadership is about to create a sense of mission, to motivate others to join them on that mission, to create and adaptive social architecture for the followers, to develop other leaders and to “get the job done.” In this sense, we do not even need technological solutions to concrete problems, but rather ethical responses. (shrink)

Present day humans are the result of a continuous evolutionary process, which is still underway (although imperceptibly since the last wave of Out of Africa migrations). Our physical traits, and both our “emotional” and “rational” mental features co-evolved, dialectically interacting with each other, and with the outer physical and social-cultural environment. In fact, H. sapiens is genetically preadapted to dialectically interact with the material and cultural contexts it is exposed to, contexts that on the other hand were, and are, increasingly (...) created by mankind itself. Also, our species is the result of a “species sorting” mechanism, among a number of different, though closely related, hominid and hominin genera, species, and subspecies. At the time being, H. sapiens is the only surviving, and genetically very homogeneous, species of the genus Homo. There were blurred boundaries, however, between our species and our closely related species, especially H. neanderthal and H. denisova. Furthermore, we all evolved, physically and mentally, from our common ancestor species of the genera Australopithecus, Paranthropus, etc. Due to our profound biological roots, evolved physical traits, evolved individual and collective mind plasticity, and evolved social complexity still keep dialectically interacting with each other in an inextricable tangle. The point where Marxian historical dialectics grafts on, and merges with, Darwinian biological dialectics roughly coincides with the beginning of Holocene. In fact, there is no apparent solution of continuity between the historical timeframe of the last 10-12,000 years, and the previous period as, once reached the stage of extended consciousness, all material/social/cultural niches and mind plasticity-driven adaptations dialectically interacted with each other according to the principles of historical materialism. (shrink)

Il saggio affronta alcune questioni che il concetto di Antropocene pone non solo alla teoria politica ma anche alle scienze umane e sociali. Lungo un percorso critico fra teorie e autori diversi (da Chakrabarty a Latour, da Moore e Malm fino all'ecofemminismo), il saggio discute il concetto di Antropocene con un approccio di “ecologia politica”. L'obiettivo è di tenere insieme la dimensione comune - umana e non umana - dell’appartenenza agli eco-sistemi terrestri, con la capacità di leggere criticamente e genealogicamente (...) le asimmetrie di potere, le disuguaglianze e i conflitti che hanno reso possibile e che tuttora strutturano l’Antropocene, nell’ottica politica di una giustizia climatica interumana e multi-specie. (shrink)

Reconfiguring the Anthropocene. Contemporary Art and New Theoretical Paradigms in the Era of Ecological Crisis This thesis investigates the transformations of contemporary artistic practices in the Anthropocene era, interpreting this geological epoch not merely as an ecological crisis, but as a catalyst for the emergence of unprecedented aesthetic sensibilities and relational paradigms that problematize and transcend traditional Western dichotomies between nature and culture, subject and object, human and non-human. The adoption of a transdisciplinary methodological approach, which integrates art-historical analysis with (...) recent theorizations in posthumanist thought, new materialism, and contemporary ecocriticism, enables the analysis of artistic practices as intra-actions that actively participate in producing new understandings of the ecological crisis. The investigation unfolds through an analytical trajectory that moves from a critical examination of the Anthropocene as an interdisciplinary paradigm, analyzing diverse geological, philosophical, and cultural perspectives, to the exploration of emerging methodologies in contemporary artistic practices. The research proceeds by examining historical genealogies from the 1960s onwards and innovative trends in environmental art, with particular attention to new apparatuses of hybridization between art, philosophy, science, and technology. Through an in-depth analysis of significant works in the European and North American landscape, the research examines the practices of artists such as Hans Haacke, Piero Gilardi, Tomás Saraceno, Pierre Huyghe, and Edward Burtynsky. Furthermore, a constructive critique of the intrinsic limitations of artistic practices related to the Anthropocene is developed, along with a problematization of new materialist theoretical perspectives within the field of contemporary art. Finally, the research examines the transformation of the aesthetic category of the sublime in the Anthropocene, with particular attention to the "toxic sublime" in Edward Burtynsky's photographs. The research findings reveal that contemporary artistic practices do not merely represent the environmental crisis, but contribute to reconfiguring the theoretical and cultural paradigms of ecological discourse, proposing new ways of thinking and practicing coexistence between human and non-human. (shrink)

Donna Haraway’s recent volume, Manifestly Haraway, offers the opportunity not only to compare two of her most influential writings side-by-side but also to revisit some of the enduring themes of her work over the past several decades. In this interview with Haraway, feminist science studies scholar Sarah Franklin explores some of the key terms in her work, looking back to some of her early work on embryology and primatology as well as exploring the more recent themes of her latest book, (...) Staying with the Trouble. (shrink)

Education for Sustainable Development is a broad and varied field of study replete with compelling advocacies for a more humane world. Across a majority of its instances however, ESD might yet be seen to labour in stealth fidelity to a mode of political economy and model of human-nature relations complicit with planetary ecocide. This essay draws largely from the thinking of Jean Baudrillard in an effort to identify the implications of ESD’s mainstay commitments, particularly as expressed in the field’s lingering (...) fidelities to anthropocentric production and modes of protagonistic optimism. Such alliances are contrasted by the immanence of inhuman planetary difference as it might habilitate more eco-centric approaches and attitudes for thinking the very possibility of sustainable development in the present era of rapid ecological transformation. (shrink)

Que se passe-t-il pour la théorie qui se met à l’écoute des savoir-sentir des danseureuses? À bien tendre l’oreille, il apparaît que « le corps » – obsession contemporaine – n’est pas toujours le domaine privilégié d’investigation de la danse. Il y a tout un monde de sentis intérieurs ou atmosphériques, nanoscopiques ou collectifs, qui se déclarent lorsqu’on s’efforce de se défaire de l’écran de fumée dressé par lecorps, concept qui, trop facilement et quoi qu’on fasse, traîne derrière lui la (...) douloureuse histoire de sa séparation d’avec l’esprit et l’intériorité – suivant le schéma des dualismes modernes qui vont du schisme nature/culture aux délétères binarismes de genre, de race et d’espèces. Cet article, écrit depuis les temps troubles du Capitalocène et de la sixième extinction de masse, part à la recherche des stratégies philosophiques (chez Erin Manning) et chorégraphiques (chez Steve Paxton) qui se sont développées pour renommer les mouvementements qui inquiètent le corps sé... (shrink)

El artículo plantea una interpretación materialista de la obra clásica de Goethe a partir de las categorías básicas de la crítica de la economía política marxista, partiendo de la premisa de que Fausto anticipa, haciendo uso de los medios literarios que le son propios, el funcionamiento del capitalismo y, en particular, la dependencia de los combustibles fósiles de este modo de producción, lo que ha dado origen a la crisis ecológica. Para ello, en un primer momento analiza las innovaciones que (...) Goethe introduce en el tratamiento literario del espacio y el tiempo a partir de las nociones de “espacio abstracto” y “tiempo abstracto”; después, se ocupa de explicar la aparición del dinero (en la obra y en la historia del capitalismo occidental) a partir de la idea de lo carnavalesco y, por último, explora la cuestión de la dominación del territorio y de la naturaleza. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie Jahrgang: 4 Heft: 1-2 Seiten: 265-275.

Il pensiero umanistico è stato influenzato nel profondo dal dibattito sull’Antropocene, nato all’interno del campo disciplinare della geologia nel tentativo di individuare un’epoca che faccia seguito all’Olocene, caratterizzata dalle tracce dell’attività umana sul pianeta. Dalla sua diffusione con Paul Crutzen e Eugene F. Stoermer, la questione dell’Antropocene ha valicato ampiamente i confini della geologia, riversandosi in altre discipline – dagli studi culturali alla filosofia – così come nei dibattiti pubblici e nell’attivismo ambientale. In questo volume il concetto di Antropocene viene (...) esaminato criticamente nelle sue principali implicazioni, affrontando temi quali il rapporto con la crisi ecologica, il femminismo, la tecnologia, i rifiuti, la democrazia, la relazione tra umano e non-umano, la sua periodizzazione, l’ecomodernismo, e altri ancora. (shrink)