CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Julian Reid After Catastrophic Biopolitics: Towards a Political Eschatology of the Anthropocene
Anthropocene literatures tend to the assumption that the human must change how it governs planetary life or face the catastrophe of its destruction. ‘Catastrophic biopolitics’ aptly describes the spirit in which knowledge concerning the Anthropocene has developed since Crutzen first coined the term. This project problematises this convergence of biopolitical and catastrophic reasoning in the context of the Anthropocene; the emergence of a catastrophic biopolitics as the consequence of this convergence; and the potentials of political eschatological thought as a resource for movement beyond the current framing of the Anthropocene as biopolitical catastrophe. In particular, the project explores political eschatology, and especially the concept of apocalypse as it was developed in the work of Gershom Scholem and others, as a resource for thinking beyond the limits of catastrophic biopolitical reasoning. In this spirit the project will critique the catastrophism of the biopolitics which shapes contemporary approaches to the Anthropocene, and deploy the concept of apocalypse, positively, to enable a new approach aimed at breaking the grip of biopolitical reason on Anthropocene theorising. The problems which the Anthropocene pose today cannot be solved simply by changing forms of biopolitics to make them more extensive and less exclusively focused on the human. Instead, they call for a new politics which abandons life as the referent object for its approach to the world as such.