On anthropolysis. Trans. Jakub Wolak

Abstract

When Hegel was binding the history of the world to the history of European national self-identity, it was assumed among his public that the age of the planet could be measured in a few millennia (1e3 or 1e4 years), not aeons (1e9 years). The fabrication of social memory and the intuition of planetary duration were thought to operate in closely-paired natural rhythms. While the deep time of the genomic and geologic record shows that that they do not, the illusion of their contemporaneity also brought dark consequences that, strangely enough, would actualize that exact same illusion. In the subsequent era, the meta-consequence of this short-sighted conceit is the Anthropocene itself, a period in which local economic history has in fact determined planetary circumstances in its own image. The temporal binding of social and planetary time has been, in this way, a self-fulfilling superstition. As such, how is the anthropos of Anthropogeny similar to or different from the anthropos of the Anthropocene? Are they correspondent? Does the appearance of the human lead inevitably toward, if not this particular Anthropocene, then an Anthropocene, and some eventual strong binding of social and geologic economies?