Anthropocene and elemental multiplicity

Abstract

Our hope in the present essay is to provide a figure for thought in response to what Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer first named "the Anthropocene." Our interest is not in providing a substitute for this concept, but in offering an alternative way of approaching the vast political-ecological work currently being attributed to it. We want to question the images of impending global catastrophe, the glorifications of human abilities to overcome such quasi-apocalyptic conditions, and the ironic celebrations of our 'natural' resilience and technological prowess that are woven through the calls to responsibility and action which characterize Anthropocene discourse. We draw our approach from a critical reading of the work of Luce lrigaray. lrigaray's project is part of a genealogy of feminist thought that predates the emergence of Anthropocene discourse and offers a sustained critique of the concepts of both Nature and Man. We share serious concerns about the limitations of lrigaray's project with regard to race and het eronormativity. However, we find her work helpful because of the way it combines two key strands: first, a critique of what she calls the hom(m)ogenizing logic of the One, whose refusal of difference(s) is as much an ecological as it is a political disaster; and second, a critical analysis of the hylomorphism which, she argues, has informed western conceptions of political life and of the larger ecological life of which the political is a part.