The Anthropocene folds geologic time into human corporeality, refocusing attention on the temporality of inhuman forces within the subject. This has generated new understandings of time, matter, and agency for the human as a collective being and as a subject capable of geomorphic acts. However, the concept of the Anthropocene also points to a paradox: the more powerful the collective impact of the species is, the less individuals living today feel capable of influencing their surrounding reality.
We have based our metaphors for inhabiting the world on material, measurable, conquerable and exploitable figures of fossil modernity. We built a ground dissociated from the sky, as the imaginary of the carbon economy has dissociated and put at a distance the atmosphere. But we are at this point where, deprived of any support, we could finally exceed the orbital movement of metaphysical thought that for centuries has gravitated around the same founding nucleus. Ready to launch ourselves out of the circle of recognition, to solicit in thought “the powers of a completely other model, from an unrecognised and unrecognisable terra incognita". (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p.136)
About the speaker
Giovanbattista Tusa is a philosopher and video artist currently based at the Institute of Philosophy of the Nova University of Lisbon, Portugal.Â
His latest work, The End, co-authored with Alain Badiou, has been published in France in 2017 and then translated with new original essays in English, Portuguese, and Spanish. He is currently working on the manuscript of his book Minima Planetaria, and he is the director of Planetary Conversations at The Philosophical Salon. His forthcoming project is a visual diary and essay film on the death of Greek philosopher Empedocles in Amazonia.
His multidisciplinary research focuses on philosophy, radical politics, cinema, ecology, contemporary arts, media theory, and animal studies.