The Anthropocene Interregnum
Ecological Marxism and the Social Metabolism of the Present
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4435133 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christian Haines (0000-0003-3647-0939, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 124 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 95-112 |
| Publication date | 2025-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | South Atlantic Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0038-2876 • E-ISSN: 1527-8026 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/00382876-11557825 |
| OpenAlex | W4406747689 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 27 |
This essay argues for an understanding of the Anthropocene as both historical impasse and historical transition. It is an impasse insofar as there is a conceptual and practical gap between human history and planetary history, or politics and ecology. It is a transition insofar as it marks the passage from one geological epoch to another and from one dominant social formation (capitalism) and the possibility of another. The author makes the case that ecopoetry and ecological Marxism operate a dialectical reversal from historical impasse to transition by mediating between ecology and politics. The author reads a poem by Stephanie Burt, "Advice from Rock Creek Park," as an instrument for sensing and conceptualizing the present as a complex coordination of contradictory social and ecological temporalities. The author then looks to ecological Marxism for how it historicizes capitalism as a transformation of human and nonhuman natures. Marxism and Karl Marx's writing contain insightful meditations on the historical realities of the human species, the social production of subsistence, and the metabolism between society and nature. Marxism offers a rich conceptual apparatus for historicizing the climate crisis as the transition to a new epoch-one that may yet hold a place for human civilization
Anthropocene · Biology · Environmental ethics · Interregnum · Political science · Sociology · Anthropology · Ecology · History · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism
Theory of the Lyric
Forces of Reproduction
The Birth of the Anthropocene
Defining the Anthropocene
Geology of mankind
Capitalism in the web of life
The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
Capital
Notes to Literature
Petrocultures
Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None
Facing the Anthropocene
Capitalism in the Anthropocene
Remainders
Climate Lyricism
One Planet, Many Worlds
The Climate of History in a Planetary Age
Planetary utopianism
Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics
The Crisis of the Present Moment and the Crisis of Contemporary Theory
Marx's Theory of Metabolic Rift
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |