ABSTRACT
This chapter takes the Anthropocene idea as an incitement to try and think the political through the Earth and its dynamical processes. If this means asking what might be new in the current ascent of the idea of humans as geologic or geophysical agents, the chapter also invites the question of how the nascent understanding of a human planet conjuncture stands in relation to earlier depictions of the interface between global humanity and the physical Earth. For humanist thought, perhaps the most troubling aspect of the discipline of geologys findings for over two centuries has been its disclosure of an Earth whose long and eventful history admits of a human presence only in the eye blink of its closing moments. The chapter considers how the experiences of a more fractious, multiple and ex-orbitant globality might be expressed, and open the question of how ethics and politics might begin to measure up to the excesses of the Anthropocene.
