ABSTRACT

This essay explores the potential relevance of tragic narratives for an understanding of human agency/inaction in the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene episteme is marked by convergences between geological, evolutionary and human temporal scales. These would have the potential to be experienced as tragic incompatibilities between different nomoi, in Hegel’s sense. Yet, they are, in fact, experienced as (1) a meta-history of homogenization; (2) an ethical externalization as “fate”; (3) the autopoiesis of an increasingly autonomous “technosphere.” Consequently, meaningful experiences of alterity, chance, sudden events that are formed, in different ways, and the underpinning of tragic thinking in modernity from Hegel to Nietzsche, thus, are increasingly erased in a worldview that blurs all ontological distinctions. Two of the defining conditions of the age are explored: (1) The nuclear bomb and the Mutual Assured Deterrence strategy are read as an Anthropocenic concept of “fate” that conceals human agency while, at the same time, emphasizing human control; (2) The rapidly increasing transformation of autopoietic nature (physis) through anthropogenic agency (thesei) and the autopoiesis of the technosphere blurs the epistemological boundaries between the laws of the biosphere and the laws of the technosphere. This blurred epistemic boundary requires tragic thinking and tragic narratives, lest it gives way to the fallacy of naturalizing the hegemony of the technosphere.