ABSTRACT
One of the most fruitful theoretical developments in the last years has been the work on nonhuman agencies. Following Charles Taylor’s notion of the ‘construals of agency,’ I argue that changes in the sense and conceptualization of agency are bound to affect the secular outlook on the world. That shift could be fittingly described as a form of (re)enchantment.
The concept of enchantment has been deployed before to explore the shift towards nonhuman agencies, but always under erasure. Such erasure should be read as an attempt to express the emergence of a new sensibility that blurs the boundaries between the religious and the secular and that it is still grasping for a language. In order to explore the meaning of (re)enchantment I return to the work of Max Weber. I argue that the current ecological crisis might be providing a fertile ground for a resurgence and/or rearticulation of religion that could be described as a form of (re)enchantment. Here (re)enchantment is understood not as a return to a pristine past but as a refashioning of religious sensibilities in response to the ecological emergency. Finally, the concept of the Anthropocene provides the bridge between the theoretical reflections over nonhuman agency and the ecological emergency. Here I explore the irony of calling ‘the age of the humans’ what in fact is an uncanny awakening to nonhuman agencies. Such understanding of the Anthropocene calls for a decentering of the anthropos that clears the way for a reappraisal of religion in the 21st century.
