Anthropokenosis. Filosofie del Nonumano

Research into the Anthropocene is at a crossroads. Its potential for significance andprovocation seems, since the time of its initial introduction, to have been exhausted. This is partly due to its lack ofscientific recognition, which was perhaps the most important thing the term, given the contextin which it was proposed, was seeking. Among those who havewritten about it over the last twenty years, a suspicion has therefore begun tocirculate at a certain point that they had, so to speak, ‘backed the wrong horse’. So, what might it mean to move from the theory of the Anthropoceneto anthropokenosis? Firstly, perhaps, to overcome the greatest theoreticalproblem facing the former: the fact that the power of humankindto influence large-scale phenomena was at once thetechnological ‘disease’ (insofar as it represented an inability to control consequences)and the only possible remedy (insofar as only the technology underpinningthese changes could be capable of correcting its own distortions).In any case, the age to come remained that of humankind, in which humankindwould have to content itself with exercising its dominion in a different way – a dominion whichit could not, under any circumstances, conceive of relinquishing.