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Finitude in Other Terms: Uncommoning Extinction - I

Sat, September 7, 1:00 to 2:30pm, Sheraton New Orleans Hotel, Floor: Five, Grand Ballroom A

Abstract

Extinction is around the corner. And not any extinction, but that of the human. After decades of anthropogenic aggression to soils, airs, rocks and waters, finitude is not anymore an scathological horizon for our species, but a present future ready to be actualized–and to be acted upon. Or so the narrative of the “anthropocene” goes. Congealed in the quarters of the geosciences but extended and empowered by the social sciences and the humanities, the “anthropocene” discourse articulates an agonistic of life in which human and biophysical boundaries, endpoints and conditions enmesh into one grand human-planet relationality–and finale. Hence the charisma of the “anthropocene” arch: its capacity to engulf in one analytics the human and the geological, politics and technique, diagnosis and action, the urgent present of capitalism and the deep time of the earth’s interiors, the One and its Others. The “anthropocene” is both a object of enquiry and an epistemological operation–and concerning our panel: the “anthropocene” has no outside.

Inspired by several calls to open up the onto-epistemic politics of the “anthropocene” narrative, in this panel we want to explore the hegemonic difficulties--even the obstacles--to think about the excesses, that while equally endangered, remain unaccounted for–even counting as not counting in Rancière’s terms, in current epistemologies of finitude and extinction. We ask: Is it possible to recognize the “anthropos” without accepting its hegemony? Which operations can enable the denunciation of capitalist territorial occupations and environmental harm without rehearsing a common “we”? How to render possible collaborations for change and reparation empowering refusal and divergence? How to narrate extinctions multiplying stories of death, life and existence?

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