Telling Friends from Foes at the Time of the Anthropocene

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Telling Friends from Foes at the Time of the Anthropocene application/pdf icon
2015

Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil & François Gemenne (editors) . The Anthropocene and the Global Environment Crisis – Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, London, Routledge, p.145-155 (originally given as a lecture, Thinking the Anthropocene, EHESS, Paris, 14th-15th of November, 2013)

Abstract

In spite of its pitfalls, the concept of Anthropocene offers a powerful way, if used wisely, to avoid the danger of naturalization while ensuring that the former domain of the social, or that of the “human”, is reconfigured as being the land of the Earthlings or of the Earthbound. Like Aesop’s tongue, it might deliver the worst – or worse still, much of the same; that is, the back and forth movement between, on the one hand, the “social construction of nature” and, on the other, the reductionist view of humans made of carbon and water, geological forces among other geological forces, or rather mud and dust above mud and dust. But it might also direct our attention toward the end of what Whitehead called “the Bifurcation of nature,” or the final rejection of the separation between Nature and Human that has paralyzed science and politics since the dawn of modernism. The lecture is dedicated to Clive Hamilton.

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Translations

Title: Distinguindo os amigos dos inimigos na época do Antropoceno
Language: Portuguese
Journal: Etnografica
Translator: Gabriela S. Pedrosa e Paulo Mendes
Date:

Date: 2015
Language: French
Translator: Franck Lemonde
Title: « Différencier amis et ennemis à l’époque de l’Anthropocène » in Didier Debaise et Isabelle Stengers (sous la direction de) Gestes spéculatifs, Presses du Réel, , 24-41