Retrospective Redundancy: The Anthropocene and the Crisis of Historical Comprehension
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Alexandre Leskanich
Abstract
This essay contends that the Anthropocene as a historicization in planetary history is symptomatic of a lurking crisis in historical comprehension. This crisis – rooted in the technologically-induced incongruence between past and future – more generally speaks to the consequent diminishment of human historical comprehension under conditions of unprecedented anthropogenic upheaval, and, ultimately, to the inadequacy of the historicizing impulse itself. Thus the Anthropocene, I suggest, fails in its retrospective redundancy to compensate for the incoherence of the historical situation it aims to comprehend, and is further symptomatic of a world that has not merely been historically mismanaged, but in which historical comprehension has itself broken down.
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© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editors’ Forum on Globality
- Editorial
- The State of Globality in a (Post)-COVID World
- Fear of Disconnecting: Global Health Imaginations and the Transformations of the Taiwanese State
- Globality and Entangled Security: Rethinking the Post-1945 Order
- Retrospective Redundancy: The Anthropocene and the Crisis of Historical Comprehension
- Against Global Literary Studies
- “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades”: Globality and Our Common Dystopian Eco-Apocalyptic Science Fiction Streaming Future
- International Relations, New Global Studies, and the Epistemic Power of the Image
- What’s Wrong with the Global? The Interconnected Roles of Inequality, Migrancy, Criminality, Religion, Class, and Caste in India
- What’s Happened to Global News?
- Coda: Ten Questions on Globality
- Review Essays
- Ludger Kühnhardt and Tilman Mayer: The Bonn Handbook of Globality
- Sean Metzger: The Chinese Atlantic; Karel Davids: Global Ocean of Knowledge
- Brian Russell Roberts: Borderwaters: Amid the Archipelagic States of America
- Sianne Ngai. Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form
- Book Reviews
- Trond Undheim: Pandemic Aftermath: How Coronavirus Changes Global Society
- Stephen Wertheim: Tomorrow the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy
- David Sepkoski: Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editors’ Forum on Globality
- Editorial
- The State of Globality in a (Post)-COVID World
- Fear of Disconnecting: Global Health Imaginations and the Transformations of the Taiwanese State
- Globality and Entangled Security: Rethinking the Post-1945 Order
- Retrospective Redundancy: The Anthropocene and the Crisis of Historical Comprehension
- Against Global Literary Studies
- “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades”: Globality and Our Common Dystopian Eco-Apocalyptic Science Fiction Streaming Future
- International Relations, New Global Studies, and the Epistemic Power of the Image
- What’s Wrong with the Global? The Interconnected Roles of Inequality, Migrancy, Criminality, Religion, Class, and Caste in India
- What’s Happened to Global News?
- Coda: Ten Questions on Globality
- Review Essays
- Ludger Kühnhardt and Tilman Mayer: The Bonn Handbook of Globality
- Sean Metzger: The Chinese Atlantic; Karel Davids: Global Ocean of Knowledge
- Brian Russell Roberts: Borderwaters: Amid the Archipelagic States of America
- Sianne Ngai. Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form
- Book Reviews
- Trond Undheim: Pandemic Aftermath: How Coronavirus Changes Global Society
- Stephen Wertheim: Tomorrow the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy
- David Sepkoski: Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene
