Vedere l’Antropocene, immaginare futuri. Note per un pensiero critico della crisi ecologica

Abstract

The Anthropocene discourse has rapidly become popular and common to very diverse kinds of knowledge. It is nonetheless a very contested category. Starting from the critique that political ecology has moved to it, we reflect upon its narrative’s blindspots and find that they can be seen as a symptom of a more general impasse of the neoliberal governance of nature and of the ecologic crisis. On the one hand, the narrative of the Anthropocene brings about a poshumanist vision that potentially decentres anthropocentrism. On the other, this same possibility becomes vehicle for increasingly profound and less reflexive intervetions by human beings on the biosphere, in particular via technoscientific develpments. This paradox seems to respond to a specifically capitalist necessity of valorising “Nature”, while not being conducive to concrete solutions to the ecologic crisis. But if we are first able to see the Anthropocene in the present historical phase, and thanks to specific kinds of knowledge that emerge now – then the very issue of knowledge is central to inventing new and more ecological ways of (re)embedding ourselves in the world. What ways of knowing can comprehend the emancipatory characters of the posthumanist implications of the Anthropocene and at the same time avoid tendencies towards the domination of the biosphere?