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‘After His death, God turned into oil, and oil became a surrogate God,’ Antti Salminen and Tere Vaden write in Energy and Experience. This essay examines two novels by John Updike in order ...

Introduction to the Special Focus Section (9.1)

This essay argues that Michel Foucault’s original introduction of the concept of biopolitics should be seen as responding to Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie’s notion of a “Malthusian curse” which during medieval and early modern times kept the French population in check. Biopolitics was, in its original conception, the management of human and nonhuman populations, securing them against famine and disease so as to allow for continuous growth. During the second half of 20th century, however, Neo-Malthusian thinkers pointed out that these strategies for immunizing human life against the vagaries of ecological existence had come to endanger the basic conditions of life precisely to the degree that they had been successful-ushering in the new geological epoch we have lately begun to refer to as the Anthropocene. This paradoxical dynamic can be understood in terms of what Roberto Esposito has described as an “immunitary double-bind”: existing immunitary defenses can no longer be dismantled without causing significant harm to human life, yet failure to dismantle them will increase the risk of incurring even greater harm in the future. Such an account, it is argued, yields a more ambivalent picture than the starkly negative views which continue to dominate biopolitical theory. Resumen Este ensayo sostiene que la introducción original de Michel Foucault del concepto de biopolítica debería entenderse como respuesta a la noción de “maldición malthusiana” de LeRoy Ladurie que durante la época medieval y moderna mantuvo bajo control a la población francesa. La biopolítica era, en su concepción original, la gestión de poblaciones humanas y no humanas, protegiendolas frente a la hambruna y la enfermedad, y permitiendo un crecimiento continuo. Durante la segunda mitad del siglo XX, sin embargo, los pensadores neo-malthusianos apuntaron que estas estrategias de inmunización de la vida humana frente a los antojos de la existencia ecológica habían terminado por poner en peligro las condiciones básicas de la vida precisamente hasta el punto de que habían tenido éxito—marcando el inicio de la nueva época geológica que recientemente hemos denominado Antropoceno. Esta dinámica paradójica puede entenderse como lo que Roberto Esposito ha descrito como una “atadura doble inmunitaria”: las defensas inmunitarias existentes no pueden desmantelarse sin causar un daño significativo a la vida humana, pero fracasar en desmantelarlas aumentaría el riesgo de sufrir aún más daño en el futuro. Tal explicación, se argumenta, ofrece un retrato más ambivalente que las vistas claramente negativas que continúan dominando la teoría biopolítica.

Ecocritics tend to think of environmentalism as a form of resistance against the anthropocentrism of Western modernity. Such a view stands in contrast to biopolitical theory, which sees modernity in terms of a naturalization of the human and a generalized effort to increase the productivity of life that cuts across species lines. Building on the work of Roberto Esposito, this process can be described as a radicalized form of ecological immunization whereby humans and their domesticates are protected from the risks that attend membership in ecological communities, resulting in an “unnatural growth of the natural” (H. Arendt). The self-destructive strategies of immunization which characterize biopolitical modernity are based on a conception of life in terms of competition over scarce resources, inevitably leading to Malthusian crises. Lynn Margulis’ understanding of evolution as symbiogenesis offers an alternative on which an affirmative biopolitics balancing the demands of immunity and community can build., Los ecocríticos tienden a concebir el ecologismo como una forma de resistencia frente al antropocentrismo del occidente moderno. Esa visión contrasta con la teoría biopolítica, que ve la modernidad como una naturalización del ser humano y un esfuerzo generalizado por aumentar la productividad de la vida que trasciende las fronteras entre especies. Basándose en el trabajo de Roberto Esposito, este proceso puede describirse como una forma radicalizada de inmunización ecológica por la cual los humanos y las criaturas domadas por ellos están protegidas de los riesgos que entraña pertenecer a una comunidad ecológica, resultando en un “crecimiento antinatural de lo natural” (H, Arendt). Las estrategias autodestructivas de inmunización que caracterizan la modernidad biopolítica se basan en una concepción de la vida en términos de competición por recursos escasos, llevando inevitablemente a crisis malthusianas. El entendimiento de la evolución de Lynn Margulis como simbiogénesis ofrece una alternativa sobre la que puede construirse una biopolítica afirmativa que equilibre los requisitos de inmunidad y comunidad.

The Anthropocene is a concept which challenges the foundations of humanities scholarship as it is traditionally understood. It calls not only for closer engagement with the natural sciences but also for a synthetic approach bringing together insights from the various subdisciplines in the humanities and social sciences which have addressed themselves to ecological questions in the past. This book is an introduction to, and structured survey of, the attempts that have been made to take the measure of the Anthropocene, and explores some of the paradigmatic problems which it raises. The difficulties of an introduction to the Anthropocene lie not only in the disciplinary breadth of the subject, but also in the rapid pace at which the surrounding debates have been, and still are, unfolding. This introduction proposes a conceptual map which, however provisionally, charts these ongoing discussions across a variety of scientific and humanistic disciplines. This book will be essential reading for students and researchers in the environmental humanities, particularly in literary and cultural studies, history, philosophy, and environmental studies.

Scholars in the environmental humanities frequently argue that a clear understanding of humanity's ecological embeddedness is sufficient to dismantle the anthropocentric biases of traditional humanism. Following Hans Blumenberg's interpretation of the Copernican turn, this article argues that the proponents of this view fail to recognize that the desire to overcome anthropocentrism was central to Enlightenment thought. Like the latter, ecological posthumanism accords itself cognitive privileges that presuppose a successful distantiation of the world. According to Blumenberg's anthropology, the need to turn away from the world in order to engage with it is a distinctly human trait. However, second-order cybernetics and Niklas Luhmann's social systems theory offer ways to conceptualize this “involution” as a general feature of living things, whose relative autonomy is predicated on the possibility of operational closure.

Among the most powerful images of twentieth century iconography is the “gusher”: the dark jet of oil rising above the drilling rig, bringing sudden prosperity to its lucky owner. Surveying the rece...

Everyday parlance assumes that the public is constituted as a “sphere,” a “rounded” space encompassing all citizens within a singular horizon of rationality. When the environmental crisis is referred to as a “global” crisis, this is usually taken to entail the imperative to match the public to the planetary sphere, with the health of the planet as the ideal “res publica ” around which a global polity must be assembled. This paper provides an outline of the alternative topology of public space which Peter Sloterdijk developed in his Spheres trilogy (1998–2004) and sketches its implications for the environmental humanities. According to Sloterdijk, contemporary world society is best understood as “foamy” or “froth-like”: its structure is that of an aggregation of immunological “bubbles,” i.e. small-scale spheres of shared concerns and risks, which are mutually constitutive but mutually impermeable. With its attempt to provide a “thick description” of the forms of human inhabitation in their material and semantic specificity, Sloterdijk’s spherology makes an important contribution to the environmental humanities.

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