ABSTRACT
Over the last fifty to sixty years, a series of developments in the Earth sciences laid the groundwork for the theory of abrupt, planet-wide climate change and the more general idea of an Earth system capable of shifting between different operating states. In this context, from the 1960s onwards, a nascent ‘planetary thinking’ emerged in the work of certain late twentieth-century continental philosophers – including Serres, Morin, Lefebvre and Deleuze and Guattari. However, with its focus on mutual, co-constitutive relations between human and nonhuman actors, post-1980s more-than-human social thought tended to turn away from the larger geologic or planetary scales. After reviewing this ‘retreat from the Earth’, this chapter explores some new ways of negotiating between the idea of a dynamic, self-organising Earth and more intimate, place-based conceptions of the human. In particular, we look at the resonances and connections between the self-differentiating powers of our home planet and the difference and diversity characteristic of our own species. This brings us to a consideration of what thinking with and through the excessive forces of the Earth might mean for addressing questions of social injustice and epistemic violence.
