“How were we able to drink up the sea?  Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?” 

—Nietzsche, The Gay Science

The Humanities and the Anthropocene: Life, Temporality, Extinction is a three-year initiative organized by Adam R. Rosenthal, Alberto Moreiras, and Teresa Vilarós-Soler, and sponsored by the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research. Featuring a multidisciplinary group of international collaborators, it aims to explore the global and local impacts of climate change, global warming, and environmental degradation, for both complex biological systems and human notions of time and being. Open to all, the initiative will host annual conferences, lectures, and workshops at TAMU, bringing humanistic, social, and natural scientific modes of inquiry into conversation.

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A Note on Year Two

I would like to thank Adam Rosenthal for his leadership last year.  It is a tough act to follow, but it falls on me to be the PI this year (and next year it will be Teresa Vilarós’ turn).  Certainly we will continue to work together, but you should write to me (moreiras@tamu.edu) with any queries or problems, etc.  What follows is a summary of activities planned for the year…

Alberto Moreiras

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Our Project

  • The first year will be devoted to the study of the relationship between the humanities, climate, and life, with a particular emphasis on biological discourse. This will give us the chance to study the impact climate change has on life on the planet in general. Prominent biologists have written on this, and this will be the year to study people such as Lynn Margulis, E. O. Wilson, and Rachel Carson among others.

  • The second year will be devoted to the study of Earth Systems Science and its implications for the anthropological notion of time, now questioned by planetary temporality in an unprecedented way. This will give us the time to study stratigraphy and the abyss that has opened between the time of the earth and the time of the human. We will study the work of Jan Zalasiewicz, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Philip Descola, and James C. Scott among others.

  • The third year will compare new proposals for thought and artistic expression that are attempting to deal with possible extinction. This will be the year specifically devoted to becoming familiar with diverse tendencies in contemporary thought in the humanities, in the field of theory, certainly, but not just philosophy: Dipesh Chakrabarty, Timothy Morton, Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, Bernard Stiegler, Claire Colebrook, Donna Haraway, and in literature Kim Stanley Robinson, William Gibson, Richard Powers.

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