Hope after ‘the end of the world’: rethinking critique in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Many contemporary thinkers of the Anthropocene, who attempt to articulate a non-modern and relational ontology, all too readily dismiss critical theory inherited from the Frankfurt School for being anthropocentric, failing to acknowledge certain basic similarities. Instead, this article argues that the scaffolding of Anthropocene thinking—the recognition of the origins of the contemporary condition of ‘loss of world’ and the hope of ‘living on in the ruins’—share much with earlier critical theorists’ recognition that the Holocaust necessitated a fundamental break with the past. In reading these two sets of literatures together, we suggest we can get a better grasp of the stakes involved in the contemporary crisis of critique, and in the speculative framings enabling alternative futures to come into being.