Not Symbiosis, Not Now: Why Anthropogenic Change Is Not Really Human

Abstract

Despite first appearances it is the early work of Derrida, less concerned with questions of ethics, politics and justice, that is most pertinent for the anthropocene era. Only an attention to what Derrida provisionally referred to as 'text,' has the capacity to take the environmental imagination beyond homely conceptions of the earth as a horizon of sense and human projects, allowing for the anthropocene's imagination of the human scarring of the planet to be both read and misread. This misreading will be most fruitful when the thought experiment of the anthropocene allows us to imagine the human archive from an inhuman (and impossible) point of view.