Agency at the time of the Anthropocene

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Agency at the time of the Anthropocene application/pdf icon
2013

"Agency at the time of the Anthropocene", in New Literary History Vol. 45, pp. 1-18, 2014. (Originally written as lecture given at the occasion of the Holberg Memorial Prize Symposium 2013: “From Economics to Ecology”, Bergen, June 4th, with the title « Which Language Should we Talk with Gaia?».)

Abstract

In an academic setting such as this symposium, I don’t need to review with you those new emotions with which the Earth is now agitated in addition to its usual motions. Nor do I need to explain why facts of geology have become news and why a piece of information about Charles David Keeling’s data at Mauna Loa has shifted from the “science and technology section” of the newspaper to a new section reserved for the damning tragedies of the Earth. We all agree that, far from being a Galilean body stripped of any other movements than that of billiard balls, the Earth has now taken back all the characters of a full-fledged actor. Indeed, as Chakrabarty has proposed to say, it has become once again an agent of history, or rather, an agent of what I have proposed to call our common geostory.

Translations

Language: Hungarian
Translator: Keresztes Balázs
Title: “Agencia az antopocen koraban”
Journal: Prae
Reference: pp. 3-20, 2017

Italian translation
in Nicola Manghi
« L’agency al tempo dell’Antropocene »
Essere du Questa Terra Guerra et Pace al tempo dei conflitti ecologici
Rosenberg& Sellier, 2019, pp. 97-120.
Rosenberg& Sellier, 2019, pp. 97-120.

[traduction en japonais Japanese translation in "Gendai-Shiso (The Contemporary Thought)" ]