Boris Robert Van Meurs

The human effaced by writing In contemporary literary discussions about climate fiction, it is often argued that the alleged anthropocentrism of literature hinders it from fruitful engagement with nonhuman elements of the ecological crisis. While critics have defended literature against this claim by appealing to particular literary techniques to narrate the nonhuman world, in this article, I explore the material non-anthropocentrism of literature through an interpretation of Blanchot’s “Literature and the Right to Death”. For Blanchot, literature is ultimately an ambiguous phenomenon that both at once expresses the power of human imagination and its limitations. These limitations become manifest mostly in the materiality of literary writing, which is a precondition for literary meaning to arise, but, according to Blanchot, never becomes meaningful itself. This material side to literature accompanies but escapes human action and imagination, highlighting their inevitable non-anthropocentric sides. While Blanchot’s non-anthropocentrism does not provide new guidelines for action, it can function as a humbling reflection on the limits of human agency.

In this article we argue that duties towards future generations are situated on the collective level and that they should be understood in terms of collective responsibility for structural injustice. In the context of climate change, it seems self‐evident that our moral duties pertain not only to the current generation but to future generations as well. However, conceptualizing this leads to the non‐identity problem: future persons cannot be harmed by present‐day choices because they would not have existed if other choices had been made. Recently, Charlotte Franziska Unruh has proposed a solution that places the duties not on the individual level but on the collective level. The current generation has a responsibility for future generations as a whole. This solution is promising, but we argue that it problematically overlooks the existence of unjust relations within the contemporary collective, as we all contribute differently to bringing future generations into existence. Therefore, we propose to graft Iris Marion Young's Social Connection Model, which is concerned with structural injustice, on to the discussion of responsibility for future generations. Our proposal incorporates the strengths of Unruh's arguments, while also allowing for a differentiated responsibility based on different implications in unjust structures.