Deep Time, Dark Times

The announcement of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, is not just a scientific classification. It marks a radical transformation in the background conditions of life on earth-and not just human life-conditions which so much of how we are and what we hope for, take for granted. This change is one for which 'we' are responsible (though we never intended it), and, coupled with climate change, is likely catastrophic. Moreover we cannot reverse it. This has severe real world consequences. But it also brings new significance to some very traditional philosophical questions-about reason, agency, responsibility, community, and Man's place in Nature. The focus is shifting from imagining and promoting the Good Life (with business as usual the default position), to the survival of the species with anything like the belief in progress and visions of flourishing we once had. With this movement in the very ground of our being, Nietzsche's "Being true to the earth" requires a radical new materialism. Deep Time draws on the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, other contemporary French thinkers, and the science of climate change. The first part reflects on the series of displacements and decenterings of the privilege of the earth, and the human, from Copernicus through Darwin, Freud to the declaration of the age of the Anthropocene. What is it to be human in a posthuman world? The second part argues for the need to develop a new temporal phronesis-a sophisticated fluency in the aporetic nature of time (the paradoxical structures with which it presents us), its multi-layeredness and multi-dimensionality. Such a temporally enhanced dwelling draws on both our human and geological history. The third part follows up the problem (from part I) of who 'we' are in respect of solidarity with other humans, and responsibility for the non-human stakeholders with which we share a planet. It also addresses a range of questions centered around political agency raised by the failures of the Kyoto process. Is a democracy-to-come the problem or the solution? And could human exceptionalism be reborn as hyperbolic responsibility rather than privilege?