Claire Colebrook

Podemos presuponer de la Tierra, el actual sujeto de nuestros escenarios, una sola cosa: no le importan las preguntas que hacemos sobre ella. Lo que llamamos catástrofe será, para ella, una contingencia. Los microbios sobrevivirán, también los insectos, sea lo que sea que desatemos. En otras palabras, es solamente por las transformaciones ecológicas globales que podemos provocar, las cuales son potencialmente capaces de poner bajo cuestionamiento los regímenes de la existencia territorial de los que dependemos, que podemos invocar a la Tierra como algo que ha sido puesto en acto gracias a nuestras historias. Desde el punto de vista de la larga historia de la Tierra misma, éste será un “evento contingente” más en una larga serie de eventos.

Mientras que la raza humana se apresura hacia su extinción, principalmente como resultado del aniquilamiento de su propio medio ambiente, nosotras las feministas podríamos responder con un: “te lo dije”. El feminismo es, como cualquier otro “ismo”, quizá demasiado diverso como para poder darle una identidad fija, y a pesar de ello es claro que su identidad ha estado dada por las críticas al hombre. Incluso en sus fases más tempranas, liberales e incluyentes, la demanda feminista de incluir a las mujeres en la categoría de “hombre” o humanidad no se hizo tanto por el bien de las mujeres como por el bien de la vida en general. No se trataba de una cuestión en la que las mujeres hicieran un reclamo egoísta, sino más bien de un llamado a una mejor vida para todos en un mundo nuevo de igualdad sexual. El feminismo nunca ha sido una cuestión de intereses particulares, sino que siempre ha apelado por una justicia mucho más amplia en la que todos los humanos puedan ser incluidos.

El problema es este: al enfrentarse con la extinción, a la especie humana se le podría presentar al fin una ética genuina, con un sentido de lo que la especie debe a la localidad (ethos) y a aquellos más allá de su propia vida orgánica (el futuro). O tal vez sea la posibilidad de la aniquilación lo que destruya a la ética de una vez por todas. Cierto, si la ética es la cuestión de cómo se debe vivir, de la simpatía con los demás, de un arte del yo, o de la creación de una virtual comunidad, entonces parecería ser el proyecto menos apropiado y viable para el presente. Si consideramos que la ética es el arte de la auto-formación, podríamos argumentar que ese arte está alcanzando su límite, y más aún, que fue precisamente una concepción de lo ético como autoproducción, automantenimiento y autorreconocimiento continuo lo que frenó el interés por el entorno en el que se desarrollaba esa autoproducción.

Despite first appearances it is the early work of Derrida, less concerned with questions of ethics, politics and justice, that is most pertinent for the anthropocene era. Only an attention to what Derrida provisionally referred to as 'text,' has the capacity to take the environmental imagination beyond homely conceptions of the earth as a horizon of sense and human projects, allowing for the anthropocene's imagination of the human scarring of the planet to be both read and misread. This misreading will be most fruitful when the thought experiment of the anthropocene allows us to imagine the human archive from an inhuman (and impossible) point of view.

Posthumous Life launches critical life studies: a mode of inquiry that neither endorses nor dismisses a wave of recent "turns" toward life, matter, vitality, inhumanity, animality, and the real. Questioning the nature and limits of life in the natural sciences, the essays in this volume examine the boundaries and significance of the human and the humanities in the wake of various redefinitions of what counts as life. They explore the possibility of theorizing life without assuming it to be either a simple substrate or an always-mediated effect of culture and difference. Posthumous Life provides new ways of thinking about animals, plants, humans, difference, sexuality, race, gender, identity, the earth, and the future.

When Freud described the “oceanic feeling” of intimated plenitude that haunted the boundaries of consciousness he both intensified a post-enlightenment aesthetics that imagined the beyond of civilization is female, fluid, and undifferentiated and gave modernist poetics a theory of an almost unthinkable serenity beyond the limits of identity. European Romanticism and modernism, for all their differences, operated largely with the assumption that being a subject required abandoning an original maternal plenitude. In The Deep, Rivers Solomon provides a counter-oedipal politics and aesthetics that affirms a difference and intensity in the depths of history and the sea, taking life and difference beyond the binaries of male/female and nature/culture.

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...

There are four ways in which one might approach the concept of difference in the work of Jacques Derrida: difference as a poststructuralist critique of the supposedly post‐metaphysical attention to meaning as generated through systems; difference as the post‐phenomenological problem of time; sexual difference; and the difference between humans and non‐humans. This chapter deals with each of these problems of difference and the concept; but it is also important to begin by saying that différance is not a concept. It argues with John Searle, Derrida made a claim for the force of concepts: a concept cannot have “fuzzy” boundaries, for a concept may only operate as a concept if it indicates a sense that would remain the same regardless of who speaks or how the concept is articulated: “when a concept is to be treated as a concept believe that one has to accept the logic of all or nothing.

Deleuze’s sense of the history of philosophy in Difference and Repetition is manifestly agonistic and counter-dialectic. Against a history of philosophy that has only considered difference as a relation between or among competing terms, Deleuze affirms a philosophy of immanence where the task of philosophy is to think difference in itself. This ‘overcoming’ of Hegel (and Plato) nevertheless intensifies rather than vanquishes Hegel’s own demand for immanence: philosophy is not one event among others, but the necessary means through which life appears to, and recognizes, itself. Life is the absolute appearing to itself. For Deleuze philosophy is also, ultimately, the means through which life takes on a higher power of expression. A world that has overcome representation is a world made expressive.