Holocene jurisprudence

Abstract

We are now accustomed to thinking of the Holocene as an epoch that we have left behind. But from what perspective do we close the Holocene and begin describing the Anthropocene? Academic disciplines have their own geology: Epistemic or medial strata, sediments or condensations, which condition the apprehension and communication of fresh insight. The phrase ‘Holocene jurisprudence’ draws attention to a particular epistemic sediment: The figure of appropriation or ‘taking’, which is reactivated in many critical commentaries on the Anthropocene. And if, speaking figuratively, one were to identify an index fossil that compellingly expresses the epistemic traditions and potentialities that are sedimented into the Euro-American figure of appropriation, then Carl Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth would be a good candidate.