Retrospective Redundancy: The Anthropocene and the Crisis of Historical Comprehension

Leskanich Alexandre ()
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Leskanich Alexandre: Independent Scholar, London, W14 0NS, UK

New Global Studies, 2021, vol. 15, issue 2-3, 181-192

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.

Keywords: anthropocene; history; historicization; crisis; historical comprehension; redundancy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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DOI: 10.1515/ngs-2021-0016

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