Abstract:

Framed by the difficulty of coming to terms with the disruptive temporalities of the climate crisis, the proposition of the Anthropocene invites a critical re-contextualization of modern concepts of time and subjectivity. The declaration of the human as an agent of geological stratification both re-inscribes and challenges the temporal self-image of western modernity as an anthropocentric narrative of progress and ontological supremacy. Establishing a dialogue between historiography and the environmental humanities, this article embeds the Anthropocene hypothesis in recent scholarship on the pluralization of modern temporalities and suggests opportunities to revisit and decenter the specific hegemonic preconceptions and implications of considering modernity and the Anthropocene as temporal regimes with universalist, yet contingent claims on divergent conceptions of being-in-time. Contextualized with references to the emergence of historicism in the late 19th century and decolonial critiques that help frame the articulation of western modernity as a practice of temporalized hegemony, this article provides a stepping-stone and introduction to what it might mean to revisit and pluralize modern times against the backdrop of the Anthropocene.

Keywords: Moderne, Zeitlichkeiten, dekoloniale Kritik, historische Kulturwissenschaften, Klimakrise

Abstract: The paper analyses Walter Benjamin’s conceptions of time in the context of Anthropocene thought. In the paper, I study Benjamin’s figures of time and discuss their contribution to understanding the Anthropocene as a critical present. I analyse Walter Benjamin’s temporalities of modernity, focusing progress and primal history (Urgeschichte) in the light of Benjamin’s idea of catastrophe. I start by explaining Benjamin’s ideas in the context of the Anthropocene discourse. I then proceed to the analysis of specific figures of time, namely of primal history (Urgeschichte), progress, catastrophe and nowtime (Jetztzeit). Questioning the ambiguity of Benjamin’s concept of history, I show a hypothetical, in Benjamin’s sense revolutionary side of the Anthropocene time. In the light of Benjamin’s thought, the latter depicts the utopian, to some extent apocalyptical horizon of the absent border between man and nature.

Keywords: Walter Benjamin, Anthropozän, Geschichte, Fortschritt, Unterbrechung, Kapitalismuskritik

Abstract: As human activities increasingly shape the material reality of the earth, it becomes important to embed the temporalities of human experience and history in the larger context of planetary temporalities. In this article I ask for a composition of planetary time that allows as a theoretical framework to explore the manifold relations between human and more-than-human kinds of time. In a first step, I show how the relation of geological ‘deep time’ to historical time in modern geology is dominantly constructed as a dichotomy and how this dichotomic construction troubles the Anthropocene discourse, for example in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s seminal essays. In a second step, I argue that planetary temporalities should not be reduced to the geological construction of deep time. As an alternative, I propose to conceive of planetary temporality as a plurality of ‘sympoietic times’. Thinking with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing, this approach highlights the ways in which heterogenous kinds of time entangle in world-making processes that shape the earth. Finally, I show how literary representations of geological time can be seen as a reservoir of knowledge about the manifold sympoietic relations between the temporalities of human experience and the time scales of earth history.

Keywords: Planetare Zeitlichkeiten, Tiefenzeit, Anthropozän, Sympoietische Zeit, Literatur und Geologie

Abstract: The new geological epoch defined by hu/man brings an end to the modern narrative and worldview of an independent anthropological agent who thrives on the passive and unlimited resources of nature and thus, one day, will transcend planetary boundaries to become truly liberated. Counterintuitively to its name, this new planetary time unit is characterized by a critical situation of formerly separated entities, hu/man and earth, which now prove to be inextricably bound together but struggle to find a common and thus livable ground. By taking ground (stemming from Greek pédon) in the sense of earth, soil and bedrock as a literally and materially relevant contact zone of our current geo-historical transformation, alternative relationships of mankind and planet can be developed. Especially the notion layers of time allows for a useful approach to both forms of horizontal manifestation, geological and historical strata, which express the interdependent reality or co-constructive worlding in the age of Anthropocene. Thus, the Anthropocene indicates an ambivalent and yet undefined dynamic for the planet and its inhabitants, since extensive geoengineering, the excavation and penetration of ground, signifies the undertaking of hu/man to realize dominance over the planet, while myriad human trace fossils are giving an ominous sign of mankind’s wasteful and self-destructive lifestyle, signaling an imminent return to the earth it originally emerged from.

Keywords: Anthropozän, Geophilosophie, Tiefenzeit, Synchronisierung, Posthumanismus