Ishmael's Anthropocene

Abstract

The closing Coda addresses the Anthropocene proposal, which, I argue, constitutes the dominant form of contemporary geological fantasy. Opening with a nod at how Ishmael, the narrator of Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick, prefigures two common responses to the Anthropocene, the chapter exposes the deep-rootedness of the phantasmatic structures that ground this epochal proposal and the narratives surrounding it, which remain bound up with affects and genres associated with underrepresented Man. The present crisis requires not the “geology of Man”—a term sometimes used synonymously with Anthropocene—but a geology against Man, one that can manifest geology's otherworld-making responsively within our own.