anthropocene

is the 'age of man' that announces its own extinction. The anthropocene narrative keeps the human as its centre, it simultaneously marks the death of posthumanism and anti-humanism, because there can be no redeeming critical anti-humanist or posthuman figure in which either metaphysics or technological and scientific advances would find a way to reconcile human life with ecology.

The Anthropocene is the 'Age of Man' that announces its own extinction. In other words, the Anthropocene thesis posits the human as the end of its own destiny. Therefore, while the Anthropocene narrative keeps the human as its centre, it simultaneously marks the death of posthumanism and anti-humanism, because there can be no redeeming critical anti-humanist or posthuman figure in which either metaphysics or technological and scientific advances would find a way to reconcile human life with ecology.

is the era in which human impact on the earth has become so forceful that we are seeing shifting seas, changes in climate, and the disappearance of innumerable species as well as placing humanity itself at the brink of extinction.

The Anthropocene is said to be the era in which human impact on the earth has become so forceful that we are seeing shifting seas, changes in climate, and the disappearance of innumerable species as well as placing humanity itself at the brink of extinction. The Anthropocene thus announces the collapse of the future through 'slow fragmentation towards primitivism, perpetual crisis and planetary ecological collapse.'1 Instead of being conceived as a speculative image of the future political economic system, the Anthropocene has been reduced to an apocalyptic fantasy of both human and world finitude.

Irmgard EmmelheinzThinkers

Irmgard Emmelheinz