_ _____; _ - - ! !

-- ---
_,;___._...._._ - - ! ---- I I -

-r·.
• I

. I

UNTRANSLATING
THEANTHROPOCENE
I .
'

I
I .
I

PHILLIP JOHN USHER

 ... the humanities have a problem with the word "human."
-Bruno Latour, "Life among Conceptual Characters"

"What is needed,'' writes Emily Apter in her introduction to the English-language edi- Phillip John Usher is associate
tion of Barbara Cassin's Dictionary ofUntrans/atables, "is not a firmer or clearer transla- professor of French and comparative
literature at NYU. He Is the author,
. tion of difficult words, but a feeling for how relatively simple words chase each other editor, or translator of six volumes and
around in context.'' 1 Adopting this approach to knowing and to knowledge, which many articles. His ne:d major publication
recognizes simultaneously the necessity of lexeme-bound concepts for thinking and is L'aede et le geographe (due from
Classiques Garnier, 2017). He is currently
the impossibility, revealed in the process of what Cassin calls "philosophizing in lan- finishing another book tentatively tided
guages,'' of those concepts ever having a fixed meaning, which is-after Derrida-always On the Exterranean: Towards a Phenom-
deferred, Cassin's monumental Dictionary unravels the translations, mistranslations, enology of Extraction. He biogs at
www.thehumanistanthropocene.net.
retranslations, partial overlaps, and conjoined histories of concepts-from abstraction
to zoion-as they pass between languages such as Arabic, Basque, Catalan, Danish, Eng-
lish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Latin, and Russian. 2 It is not sup-
posed to be a utilitarian dictionary. The user cannot "look up" a given term in order
to locate some preexisting '1equivalent" in another language. On the contrary, the user
ends up convinced that there is ultimately no source-language original, only a swarm of
partial equivalents. Any given term is shown to have gathered its various meanings and
associations from bumping into, and off of, other related terms in the same and other
languages. Some recent critical work-especially that of Timothy Clark-has brought
deconstruction to what we might loosely term "eco-theory" or the "environmental
humanities," but Cassin's and Apter's specific push for "philosophizing in languages"
has largely ignored, and been largely ignored by, our collective arrival into the Anthro-
pocene.' Scientists and humanities scholars have so far expended considerable criti-
cal energy on seeking out "firmer or clearer" definitions of the new epoch. But neither
community of scholars has paid much direct attention to the "relatively simple" ety-
mon anthropos. It is not enough-as countless books and articles do-to "translate" it as
"man" or "human."
Before a first trial of untranslating the Anthropocene, let us note that while attempts
'
to find "firmer or clearer" definitions of the word have taken many forms, a fair num-
ber of them fit into one of two categories. The first category of responses concerns the
seeking out of ever-clearer definitions: for example, did the Anthropocene begin in the
late eighteenth century with James Watt's invention of the steam engine, or on July 16,
1945 with the Trinity nuclear test, or else in 1610 when atmospheric carbon dioxide lev-
els reached a low point of 271.8 p.p.m. following the genocide of New World inhabit-
ants and concomitant regeneration of forest and grasslands?' Here, definition is about
chronology-but it is also about tethering the anthropos to a certain entanglement with
technology, as if the anthropos of the Anthropocene only comes into being via its nonhu-
man opposite, as if the so-called Age of Man dates from when "Man" no longer relied
only on "men.'' The second category of responses, equally exhibiting unspoken faith in
the capacity of words to possess precise definitions, takes the shape of a proliferation

DIACRITICS Volume 44, number 3 (2016) 56-77 ©2017 Cornell University

58 DIACRITICS » 2016 » 44.3

T
of alternative or supplemental terms, which all eject the anthropos or mark it as some-
how insufficient: if the Anthropocene does not suit, try on for size the Agnotocene,
Anthrobscene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene, Eremocene, Homogenocene, Manthropo-
cene, Naufragocene, Northropocene, Outiscene, Phagocene, Plantationocene, Polemo-
cene, Phronocene, Thalassocene, Thanatocene, Thermocene, or some of the other cenes
that have circulated.' Overlapping and interrogating each other, these terms single out,
reveal, and develop a variety of conceptual flickerings-including and perhaps especially
blind spots-of the Anthropocene as concept. The first responses seek out geological
chronologies and technological alliances; the second try to refine the original conceptual
proposition and its consequences. In their pursuit of clarity, both turn on an assumption
that concepts can, so to speak, be tied down. And in the process they suggest that the
anthropos is not the right etymon-or at least that if it is, it is only in the deferrals it initi-
ates. What if, to take this realization seriously, we take a different approach and try to
untranslate the Anthropocene?
A good place to start is with the entry titled "Menschheit, humanitiit" within Cas-
sin's Dictionary ofUntranslntables, written by philosophers Marc Crepon and Marc de
Launay and completed by an encadre on "The Complex Architecture of Humanitas in
Latin Humanism" by the scholar of classical literature Fran~ois Prost. The entry parses
out some of the key points of contact between the histories and usages of various terms
as they pass between languages, especially Latin humanitas (that which is not animal
or divine, and by extension that which characterizes human nature or behavior) as it
brushes up against Menschengeschlecht (belonging to the human race), Menschen-
tum (being part of humanity), and Humanitiit (showing that one is moved by a sense
of humanity).' The fact that Crepon and de Launay never once mention the anthropos
should give us pause. Clearly, glossing the "Anthropocene" as anything like the ''Age of
Man" or the "Age of the Human" must be inadequate if the word for "Man" or "Human"
can be set aside from an unpacking of Menschheit and Humanitat. What exactly are we
saying when we invoke the anthropos? What work does this etymon do? How does it
relate to the various terms in the entry for "Menschheit, humanitat"? If (almost) every-
one agrees that our current climate predicament is manmade, then what is (conceptu-
ally) so troubling with the anthropos and why are so many alternate or complementary
terms proliferating? And further, a question important for we in the humanities, how
does the anthropos differ from the homo?
To get a sense of who or what the anthropos of theAnthropocene is, what part(s) of
the human, of the human race, of humanity, she/he/it invokes, and before going back
to the classical Greek term itself, it is first useful to attend to the way in which that
same etymon populates our shared academic lexicon. Coined by an academic in an
academic context-details of which we shall revisit below-the "Anthropocene" chases
around, and is chased around by, other lexemes marked for primarily academic use.
A peek at the OED-anthropolatry, anthropolite, anthropophagy, anthrozoology, etc.-
confirms the amount of chasing. The Anthropocene exists alongside these terms and
necessarily inherits its anthropos from them as much as from classical Greek itself.
 Untranslating the Anthropocene » Phillip John Usher 59

The commonest and most familiar of related disciplines is probably anthropology, so

let us begin there. If the anthropos of the Anthropocene is the same one we have in
anthropology, then what are we dealing with? Clearly, whatever Richard Harvey meant
when he first used the term "anthropology" in 1593, the anthropos of this "science of
man" has never really been "so general."
never particularly unmarked or univer- If (almost) everyone agrees that our
sal, for the simple reason that the disci-
pline generally deals with "the study of current climate predicament is man made,
the life, practices, and customs of a given
human group." 7 The human here, then, is then what is (conceptually) so troubling
defined not in relation to or in opposition
from, say, the divine or the animal, not by with the anthropos and why are so many
characteristics such as the ability to use
language, but as some specific group of alternate or complementary terms
' individuals, the accumulation of which
groups perhaps add up to, but never proliferating? And further, a question
define the universal nature of, some/the
human in general. Throughout its history important for we in the humanities, how
anthropology has construed the anthro-
pos neither as any-human-whatsoever, does the anthropos homo?
differ from the
nor as a universal human being like me,
but as a member of a group to which I-and my notebook-wielding anthropologist col-
leagues, with whom as their reader I perhaps align myself-generally do not belong.'
The anthropos is reified and held at a distance. As Nishitani Osamu has argued, the
anthropologist confronts the anthropos, her object of study, "just as a naturalist would
treat a specimen of natural history."9
Moreover, and as can be confirmed by glancing, as Dori Tunstall has suggested we do,
at the covers of anthropology textbooks in any college bookstore or by doing a Google
Image Search for "anthropology textbook,'' the anthropos of anthropology is almost
universally assumed to be non-Western (from the New World, Africa, the.Asia-Pacific
region, etc.), either extra- or ante-European. Alas and amazingly, this is still the case sev-
eral decades after the publication of Faye Harrison's Decolonizing Anthropology. Beloit
College anthropologist Jennifer Esperanza can still ask rhetorically: "Why can't there be
images of, for example, a group of white American women eating salads, on the cover?" 10
It is just this distance-this notion that the anthropos is always some strange object to be
observed from afar-that structures the mocking portrait of anthropologists that we find
in Alain Mabanckou's novel Memoires de pore-epic: anthropologists, says the porcupine
of the book's title, are drawn to study "the customs (mamrs) of other men whom they
consider to be curiosities compared to their own culture"; their method is to install usat- '
ellites in the village to spy on people" in order to detect when one of these other men is at
death's door so that they can write about these other burial practices and finally "finish
0

the fucking book" (terminer ce putain de bouquin). 11

 60
'!'
Figure 1. "Mensuration de la longueur
de l'oreil!e droite." Alphonse Bertillon,
ldentrfication anthropometnque, 1893
Division of Rare and Manuscript
Collections, Cornell University Library
DIACRITICS » 2016 » 44.3 l
The point, then, is that the anthropos is the object of study and explicitly not the
person doing the studying. If such is the anthropos carried into the Anthropocene, this
obviously raises some serious questions, starting with: is the human impugned by the
Anthropocene thus equally Other? Equally Not-Me? And if so, how do I relate to that
Not-Me? Am I, so to speak, off the hook? The name of our new era generates in and
of itself-before we even try to interpret from a given perspective-the issue appre-
hended by Timothy Morton in Dark Ecology: "when I think myself as a member of
the human species, I lose the visible, tactile, 'little me'; yet it wasn't the tortoises that
caused global warming."' 2 The very term "Anthropocene," when we untranslate it, sets
up a certain relationship between little me, amateur or professional user of the term,
and this other human over there. The word claims certain conceptual territories from
which it is difficult to escape, and sets up the very difficulties that the proliferation
of alternate terms such as those listed above attempts to rectify. When
Dipesh Chakrabarty writes that "however anthropogenic the current
global warming may be in its origins, there is no corresponding 'human-
ity' that in its oneness can act as a political ~gent," he, too, points at this
precise impasse.u
Lest we think the problem is anthropology rather than the anthro-
pos, or that the preceding discussion thereof is only reductive (it is cer-
tainly not my goal to speak ill of the whole field), and lest we think the
rapprochement merely arbitrary, we can note that similar conclusions
result if we turn to the anthropos of anthropometry, a practice the OED
describes as the "measurement of the human body with a view to deter-
mine its average dimensions and the proportion of its parts, at different
ages and in difference races or classes." 14 Once again, this human is every-
one and no one, at once averaged and categorized, radically over there
and not me. Even when applied to a specific individual, anthropometry
clearly delimits that individual as an anthropos that is other than the
measurer. The anthropos of anthropometry is-as we see in figure 1-
identifiable not with the caliper-holding hands that measure, but with
the head to whose ear those calipers are administered. Further, the fact
that this illustration of the measuring of the human ear, in a book titled
Identification anthropometrique (1893), is the work of a certain Alphonse Bertillon who
was not just a researcher in biometrics but also a police officer, the inventor of the "mug
shot," and a keen practitioner of anthropometry. as a legal tool-not to mention a wit-
ness for the prosecution in the Dreyfus affair-clarifies the resolve and the character
of the observation practiced by the anthropometrist: "Find the Guilty One! It's not me!
I'm on the side of law and order." Do we not find here the lexical and scientific van-
ishing point of the Anthropocene's preprogramming that causes it to exclude anyone
uttering its name? And is not the Anthropocene equivalent to Bertillon's images the now
well-known collection of graphs that Will Steffen, Jacques Grinevald, Paul Crutzen, and
John McNeill include in their article, "The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical
r
iI
Untranslating the Anthropocene » Phillip John Usher 61

Perspectives"? Plotting a variety of anthropogenic changes over time, inter alia atmo-
spheric CO, concentration, great floods, the fall in global biodiversity, loss of tropical
rainforest and woodland, ozone depletions, as well as seemingly related measures of
human activity such as global population, GDP, water use, number of motor vehicles and
McDonald's restaurants, international tourism, these graphs depict the same calipered,
averaged, abstract human of anthropology and anthropometry that is not us!' Just as
the dimensions of my head are measured
and computed by anthropometry, so my The point is not that a scientist named
CO, footprint is in-but is impossible to
extract from-the Anthropocene charts, the Anthropocene-that much is just
summoning us to acknowledge the com-
plexity of our relationship to what Morton historical fact-but that it is named from
calls hyperobjects. 16 The problem, as Mor-
ton also points out, is that we are the guilty the scientist's point of view, grasped as
party and that the Anthropocene is-from
the point of view of genre-dark, i.e., noir if with calipers, because of the anthropos
fiction: "I'm the detective and the crimi-
nal!"17 The term "Anthropocene," via its who requests-as a word-to be grasped
conceptual ties to anthropology, anthro-
pometry, and other anthro-disciplines, that way.
thus keeps the anthropos at a distance,
seemingly making the Anthropocene impede access to the awareness of a collapsing of
the distinction between detective and criminal central to Morton's dark ecology. The
anthropos refuses to be "dark" in that sense, for he refuses to be confused with the note-
book- or caliper-wielding expert, which is why we might think of the main task in the
environmental humanities as being to bring that anthropos "over to the dark side" so
that we may communicate with him/her/it.
We thus have an objectified anthropos who/that enacts a partitioning of science and
politics. There is the observer (the climate scientist, the geologist), who thinks scien-
tifically, and there is the observed (you, me, everyone). The point is not that a scientist
named the Anthropocene-that much is just historical fact-but that it is named from
the scientist's point of view, grasped as if with calipers, because of the anthropos who
requests-as a word-to be grasped that way. The partitioning thus performed is pre-
cisely the one that Bruno Latour identifies and analyzes in works such as We Have Never
Been Modern (1991) and Politics ofNature (1999). If the push ofLatour's theoretical proj-
ect, as expressed in the first of these two works, is toward a reconnecting of the "chemi-
cal" and the "political,'' toward a "retying of the Gordian knot,'' then the Anthropocene
surely, as we see when we- start to untranslate it, accelerates in the opposite direction,
toward a quarantining of the scientific away from the political and the cultural, which
perhaps explains why Latour himself now prefers to the Anthropocene the term "the
New Climatic Regime." 18 The Anthropocene, as a concept, must be seen a prior~ as a
product of Latourian modernity.
62 DIACRITICS » 2016 » 44.3

The conceptual work being done by the etymon anthropos within the idea of the
Anthropocene comes into starker relief still when we inquire into the chasm that exists
between it and the Latin homo, especially as these terms, as they travel, are revalued,
retranslated (and mistranslated). At first glance, the two words may appear synonymous.
Both express the ideas "man" and/or ''human," and indeed as their meanings play out
within their own respective language worlds, they certainly overlap. In classical Greek,
anthropos is a term at once generic and individualizing. As the LSJ enumerates, it can
refer to men (in opposition to gods); it can refer to a man, as in "a fellow"; in the plural,
it can refer to mankind; it can be used in the vocative, frequently with a contemptuous
sense, e.g., "addressing a slave"; and in the feminine, it can refer to a woman 19 The Latin
homo is similarly capacious: it can refer generally to the human race or mankind; it can
afford to the human qualities both positive (as a reasonable or moral being) and negative
(as a weak and mortal one); it can single out man from woman; etc. From approximately
Cicero onward, however, the anthropos and the homo part ways, as the Latin humanitas
comes to betoken not an eternal and shared humanness, but something acquired-let's
say something cultural-that separates not the human from the divine, but one individ-
ual human from another, i.e., the learned from the unlearned and the civilized from the
uncivilized. There thus comes to be an opposition between the homo and the humanus
homo, hence the fact that it was not an uncommon compliment to refer to an esteemed
author as humanissime vir, most worthy (most human) man. As Prost writes, in his
encadre for the Menschheit entry in Cassin's Dictionary of Untranslatables, humanitas
"establishes itself as a set of characteristics that supposedly define what a civilized man
is, as opposed to what he is not, and from which follow certain duties he has to observe
in relation to himself, and to his fellow humans." 20 The anthropos belongs to science and
to ''Nature," the homo to the humanities and to "Culture." Our two humans dance their
humanity on either side of Latour's Great Divide that splits nonhumans/Nature from
humans/Culture/Society."
The productive tension between these two humans crystallizes in that famous line
from Terence's Self-Tormentor: "I am a human (homo sum) and, I think, nothing per-
taining to humans is foreign to me (humani nil a me alienum puto)," a line said by Augus-
tine to have been met by great applause on its first being spoken and which Montaigne
inscribed on one of the beams in his tower library." Terence's formula earnestly posits
a direct connection between the thinking human (homo sumjputo) and the general cat-
egory of the human (humam), between which nothing (nil) can come. The line says
nothing less than the exact opposite of the Anthropocene, which announces rather ''I
look on at what men have done and it and they remain wholly alien to me." One figure of
the human beckons alienation, the other does not. The demarcation between the Latin
and Greek humans is further clarified by Osamu, who summarizes concisely as follows:
whereas the anthropos "cannot escape the status of being the object" of knowledge, the
homo "is never defined from without"-rather, the homo ''expresses itself as the subject"
of knowledge." The homo, that is, can become an anthropologist, an anthropometrist, an
Untranslating the Anthropocene » Phillip John Usher 63

anthropocenist, etc. It is surely the potentially stultifying objectification of the anthro-

pos that leads environmental studies scholar Jennifer Jacquet to posit the notion of an
"Anthropocebo effect," calling the Anthf.opocene a "dangerous cultural frame" because
of its potential for cultivating hopelessness marked by the fact that not nil but every-
thing separates the thinking human from humanity's aggregate actions."
We must be careful at this turn not to assume that the homo can become some kind
of hero. It would be easy, but unwise, to slide from statements about the inescapable and
grounding subject-ness-let us precisely keep the word subjectivity at bay-of the homo
and thus of humanism and the humanities toward a hierarchy that makes the human
central and the nonhuman peripheral. It is not for naught that, in the Anthropocene,
the relationship between humans and nonhumans (nonhuman animals, stones, etc.) has
become one of the most urgent areas of cultural history and critical theory. And it is also
not coincidental that Kantian correlationism-according to which the world exists for
me-is under active investigation from various perspectives and that Object Oriented
Ontology (000), speculative realism, and other flat-ontological modes of thought are
being asserted." But by the same token, we must be careful not to make the homo our
enemy. A whole other article could-and should-be dedicated to untranslating the
homo, humanism, and the humanities. Only a few opening points can be made here to
sharpen the blurry line between our Greek and Latin humans, an especially worthy task
given that the Anthropocene is all too frequently assumed to be critically and seamlessly
coextensive with posthumanism. This is problematic, as if the homo were by definition a
subject position from which it would be impossible to talk about both the anthropos that
we are (not) and about all that is nonhuman. Even among the thinkers most central to
thinkingthe Anthropocene, the homo is often assumed to be self-obsessed. When Latour
aligns "humanism" with "modernity" and charges both with making "nonhumanity"
invisible," and when Srinivas Aravamudan calls Luc Ferry's rejection of deep ecology
a "humanist approach" because Ferry sees "value in nature as entirely anthropocentric,
and unashamedly so," 27 and when Chakrabarty states thatthe collapsing together of"nat-
ural history and human history" marks the end an "age-old humanist distinction,"" it is
as if the word "humanism" is taken to be a simple synonym for 'anthropocentrism"-but
1

that assumed synonymy is simply a refusal of the word's long and complex histories. 29
Kenneth Gouwens has shown recently, in a vital article titled "What Posthumanism
Isn't;' that Cary Wolfe pays only "negligible attention" to early modern humanism in
his What Is Posthumanism?-there is no mention of Petrarch, Valla, Erasmus, or others.
No study can be exhaustive, of course. Problematic, however, as Gouwens demonstrates
in no uncertain terms, is that despite this lack of coverage, "the humanism that Wolfe
sets up as a foil [for posthumanism] resembles only marginally how leading scholars of
intellectual and cultural history have used the term with respect to Europe in the period
extending roughly from 1250 to 1600."'° Gouwens's admonition is surely justified: Wolfe
opens his book by stating that "most definitions of humanism look something like the
following one from Wikipedia: 'Humanism is a broad category of ethical philosophies
that affirm the dignity and worth of all people,"' to which he opposes posthumanism
64 DIACRITICS » 2016 » 44.3
I !

as a "historical moment in which the decentering of the human" cannot be ignored.' 1

As Gouwens phrases it, Wikipedia, while "as good a place as any to eavesdrop on the
Zeitgeist," in this case offers up a definition that is "wildly misleading."" Similarly, Rosi
Braidotti, in The Posthuman, also emphasizes the idea of a "de-centering of Man" as
constitutive of posthumanism and-as if to stage this decentering as a simultaneous
rejection of specifically early modern humanism-she opposes Leonardo da Vinci's
Vitruvian Man (c. 1490) to various new artworks that revamp it, such as Maggie Stief-
vater's Vitruvian Cat, to encapsulate the idea that early modern humanism has been
replaced by posthumanism."
Such critical genealogies-even if they claim to be theoretical rather than historical-
are disingenuous. If some early modern humanists seem to celebrate human excellence
or human exceptionalism, such celebra-
The point is not just that Montaigne tions are not universal and certainly never
constitutive of humanism; moreover, they
and many other early modern humanists frequently result from partial or mis-
readings of key texts, most notably
were already posthumanists in many Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's De homi-
nis dignitate (On the Dignity of Man)." If
regards, but rather that to oppose one needs a memorable reminder that early
modern humanists could-just like post-
posthumanism to early modern humanism humanist thinkers,.-decenter the human,
one need only think of Montaigne's quip in
is both erroneous and confusing. the "Apologie de Raimond Sebond" (Apol-
ogy for Raymond Sebond), part of course
of a much longer and more complex argument, that "the most wretched and frail of all
creatures is man, and at the same time the most puffed up with pride" (la plus calamit-
euse et fraile de toutes !es creatures, c'est i'homme, et quant et quant la plus orgueil-
leuse)." The point is not just that Montaigne and many other early modern humanists
were already posthumanists in many regards, but rather that to oppose posthumanism
to early modern humanism is both erroneous and confusing. It is important to remember
that the popular-let's call it Wikipedia-understanding of humanism as some cocktail of
secular anthropocentrism and generalized empathy for humanity has a long and compli-
cated history. Vito R Giustiniano plots that history back to eighteenth-century France,
when a 1765 journal article reasoned that the "general love for humanity" might be called
humanism, "for it is high time that a word be created for such a beautiful and necessary
idea!"' After the various senses given to the word by Marx, Feuerbach, Heidegger, and
others, the 1933 Humanist Manifesto, signed by thirty-four intellectuals including John
Dewey, would secure for good the idea of humanism as a secular celebration of human
potential, "in an effort to replace traditional religious beliefs by stalwart confidence in
our capability to achieve moral perfection and happiness.""
It would probably he best for everyone if the word "humanism" were either com-
pletely abandoned, or else used only on the condition that authors define what they
 ''
!

Untranslating the Anthropocene » Phillip John Usher 65

mean by it. What is clear already is that homo and anthropos have come to d~signate
quite different humans, the dialogue between whom, theoretically and practically, is far
from obvious. To talk of the Anthropocene is to write ourselves out of the picture, to
objectify the human culprit as Other, to define our times as An Epoch in Search of a Sub-
ject, but also to introduce a tense relationship between the thinking/writing homo and
the out-there, averaged, and calipered anthropos. The point is not, of course, to inveigh
against the term "Anthropocene;• nor necessarily to sing its praises (although I do that
elsewhere), but rather to attempt to come to terms with what we say despite ourselves
and to become aware of the queries, affordances, and dead-ends that we necessarily
inherit from a word's kinship with other words and its own past, present, and future. Nor
is the point here to define the Anthropocene more precisely, but to tease out, as Peter
Osborne put it, some of "the conceptual differences carried by the differences between
languages ... via the fractured histories of translation."" We see that the anthropos and
the homo have come to function quite differently in our languages and lexicons-object
vs. subject, averaged vs. individualized, out-there vs. here, Big Other vs. "little me," doing
vs. thinking, etc.

In the light of these attempts to defarniliarize the overly familiar Anthropocene by writ-
ing it back into some of its more distant histories, it is appropriate that we fast-forward to
two specific moments when the term Anthropocene came to be defined in order to rein-
scribe them within, and view them anew from, the longer fractured histories explored so
far. Let us turn to a first-person narrative of the Eureka moment when the atmospheric
chemist Paul Crutzen coined the term "Anthropocene" in the year 2000: "I was at a con-
ference where someone said something about the Holocene .... I suddenly thought that
this was wrong. The world has changed too much. So I said: 'No, we are in the Anthro-
pocene."'39 This short anecdotal account is rhetorically rich. It captures the aha! of a
sudden understanding of that which was previously incomprehensible. Crutzen does
not say that he was, as if a professional lexicographer, involved in the c.onscious game
of inventing a new word to capture something already perceived, but as yet unnamed.
Rather, a preparatory moment of fuzziness ("someone said something") is succeeded,
paratactically, by anew intuition, marked by an epoch-ending "No;• but also by continued
vagueness ("The world has changed too much"). Beyond the possibility of hearing here
a reminiscence of Antonio Stoppani's 1873 suggestion that the collective "telluric force"
of hum'!Ils might suggest entrance into the "anthropozoic era;• the important point is
surely elsewhere.'° Indeed, the anecdote tells us much, for in this originary scene Crut-
zen recounts his becoming aware, as a thinking subject (homo) in an academic context,
of what "the world" of anthropoi has become, replaying the split between the observer
and the observed."
The second, more detailed and perhaps more theoretically useful, moment dates
from May 2000, when biology professor Eugene Stoermer (who had been using the
 1 I
66 DIACRITICS » 2016 » 44.3 I

term independently since the 1980s or '90s) and Crutzen (who contacted Stoermer
after realizing their co-intuition) published a short article titled simply "The 'Anthro-
pocene"' -nota bene the hesitation-branding quotation marks around the fledgling con-
cept-in the International Geosphere-Biosphere Newsletter. In one sense, Crutzen and
Stoermer's founding article offers clear and precise definitions of the new epoch. But
in another sense, the article also offers more (or less) than a definition. Despite itself it
starts to untranslate the new term in the way that its authors lead up to it in their argu-
mentation. It is important to reproduce here a number of the key sentences wherein
delineation occurs:
The expansion of mankind, both in numbers and per capita exploitation of Earth's resources,
has been astounding.

In a few generations, mankind is exhausting the Fossil fuels that were generated over several
hundred million years.

More than half of all accessible fresh water is used by mankind.

Human activity has increased the species extinction rate by thousand to ten thousand fold in
the tropical rain forests.

Mankind releases many toxic substances in the environment.

Coastal wetlands are also affected by humans, having resulted in the loss of 50% of the
world's mangroves.

Mechanized huma~ predation ("fisheries') removes more than 25% of the primary produc-
tion of the oceans in upwelling regions and 35% in the temperate continental shelf regions.

Anthropogenic effects are also well illustrated by the history of biotic communities that leave
remains in lake sediments.

It seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology
and ecology by proposing to use the term "ant~ropocene" for the current geological epoch:42

Aligning the main designations that pertain to something like the "human,'' we thus have
(in a remarkable defile): mankind (n.), mankind (n.), mankind (n.), human (adj.), man-
kind (n.), humans (n.), human (adj.), anthropogenic (adj.), and finally "anthropocene"
(n.)-nota bene the lowercase "a" and the quotation marks. As the argument for the new
epoch advances, the authors thus progress from indicting "mankind" (whose roots lead
back to Old English man and Old Norse maor), to incriminating "humans" (from homo
in its non-qualified Menschheit notHumanitdt sense), before turning definitively to the
Greek anthropos, securing this non-qualified not-cultured sense of the human, first via
the adjectival anthropogenic, then in the newly forged name for the new era. As we prog-
ress through the article, Greek quite concretely supersedes the Latin, the anthropos ousts
the homo, arguably performing here a shoring up of a scientific, objective, lexeme. (As
likely goes without saying, I have no particular interest in the authors' intentions here.)
r "
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Untranslating the Anthropocene » Phillip John Usher 67 ,,

I'

,,
""
Stoermer and Crutzen could, moreover, have called the new epoch the Homocene or the
Humacene-but they did not. A very small number of authors have referred to the upcom-
ing sixth extinction with the term Homocene, but that is clearly not the consensus-and
surely because the homo, the human as apprehended in the manner of the homo, is sup-
posed to occupy the role of the observer, not the observed, the Anthropocenist, not the
anthropos." The way in which Stoermer and Crutzen give birth to the "Anthropocene"
itself testifies to the inheritance of a certain anthropos from other disciplines. In seeking
to name this human, they reject both "mankind" and the homo in favor of the anthropos
-those rejections are as significant, here, as the fin:il opting for the Greek.

To connect back with our point of departure, we can now see that if so many thinkers have
attempted to oust the anthropos in order to replace, or supplement, the Anthropocene
with any number of technological alliances or alternate concepts, it is because the anthro-
pos is detached, too much an inert and averaged being who is not really a being at all, not
"dark" enough. To pursue our task one step further, let us play along with the ejecting
of the anthropos to see how a few of the proposed alternate terms designate something
about-or lacking in-that same anthropos. The surrogate doing the most chasing around
of late is "Capitalocene;' which ousts the anthropos by virtue of the fact that the term
''Anthropocene"-as Slavoj ZiZek put it-implicates a "species" (another term to add to
our growing list of humans!) rather than an economic system: the present state of affairs
is "entirely due," he writes, "to the explosive development of capitalism,"44 an empha-
sis developed, in a less theoretical register, in Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything.
Perhaps to confirm the pedigree and sense, it might have been judicious to speak of the
Kapitalocene. In any case, substituting_ capital/kapital for anthropos parachutes into
the definition of our new era the reminder that anthropoi are already, before swarming
together as a collective geological force, aggregated and measured-to remain with vocab-
ulary employed so far-by the economic patterns of capitalist modes of production and
global capital flows. There is a substitution here, which affiliates geology with capital, via
the human labor that intervenes in between, but the lexeme still designates something as
an object. Like the anthropos, the proletariat is a group identity in which it can be difficult
for a worker to find herself.
The essays gathered in Jason W. Moore's Anthropocene or Capitalacene? make a
number of major claims to argue for the Capitalocene. In addition to underscoring how
the Anthropocene is blind to economics, the collection suggests inter alia that (a) it is
anthropocentric (Eileen Crist); (b) it excludes other species (Donna Haraway); (c) it
replays the human-nature binary, ignoring their "double-internality," i.e., how each con-
stitutes the other (Moore); and (d) it perhaps ushers in, under the veil of a problem, a
solution: geoengineering (Elmar Altvater), i.e., by suggesting that because humans are
a geological force, they should become a greater and more intentional one. The over-
riding concerns here are the erasure of capitalism and-in Crist's words-the fear that
68 DIACRITICS » 2016 » 44.3
1i

the new term might keep us fantasizing about "the almighty power of that jaded abstrac-
tion 'Man;" the consequences of which would be both theoretical and practical. 45 There
are, of course, arguments for and against the Capitalocene as a replacement. Morton, for
one, brushes the term aside, writing that "capital and capitalism are symptoms of the
problem, not its direct cause;' adding that "if the cause were capitalism, then Soviet and
Chinese carbon emissions would have added nothing to global warming"-a fair point,
difficult to dispute. 46 Moreover, the substitution might be considered superfluous in the
light of what has been unraveled above: is not the anthropos of anthropology or anthro-
pometry also already caught up in capital? Yet we don't generally speak, for example, of
capitology to point out that anthropology studies groups of humans who are governed
by economic realities, nor of capitalmetry in order to emphasize the pecuniary origins
of criminal stereotypes. But the point here is not in any case to be for or against it, but
rather to note what substituting capital/kapital- for anthropo- accomplishes. It might be
further noted that Capitalocene does both more and less work than its proponents per-
haps wish. Ultimately derived from the Latin caput (head), via the nominalized adjective
capita/is (of the head), close to the French cheptel, capital- already captures in its origins
a way of apprehending the place of the anthropos in the world, namely as the owner
and economic exploiter of livestock. It is hard to see how this is less anthropocentric,
or how it liberates us in any way from the fantasy of the "almighty power of ... 'Man.'"
If "Anthropocene" potentially allows geoengineering-by asserting that humans are a
geological force-then "Capitalocene" similarly allows large-scale exploitation of the
nonhuman by its very etymology. A fuller untrans]ation of "Capitalocene" would involve
unpacking fully the way in which critiques of capitalism explain agency, via the notions
of commodity, labor, use value, and alike-but such a task must be taken up elsewhere.
Donna Haraway offers up another key alternate term, the "Chthulucene," whose cen-
tral push is to capture how "assemblages of organic species and of abiotic actors make
history," i.e., to promote a multi-species perspective on our predicament by "making
kin.'' 47 Haraway, in a dazzling and perhaps confounding display, coins the term "after
the diverse earth-wide tentacular powers and forces and collected things with names
like Naga, Gaia, Tangaroa (burst from water-full Papa), Terra, Haniyasu-hime, Spi-
der Woman, Pachamama, Oya, Gorgo, Raven, A'ak.uluujjusi, and many many more." As
such, the Chthulucene takes into lexical custody the agency of multi-species assem-
blages that entangle "myriad temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active
entities-in-assemblages-including the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhu-
man, and human-as-humus."" Haraway herself offers up a tentative untranslation of her
proposed term, engaging with the "mycorrhizal symbioses" to be found in "Indo-
European tangles."" Ultimately, the Chthulu- thus evicts the anthropos in preference
for this multi-species etymon, born from H. P. Lovecraft's "monstrous male elder god"
Cthulhu (nota bene the different spelling), which gave its name-via scientist Gustavo
Hormiga-to a certain spider, the Pimoa cthulhu and which Haraway wrestles back-
changing Cthulhu to Chthulu-towards the chthonic and ultimately ancient Greek
khthan (earth). Haraway comments about "[her] spider" that "the savvy arachnid is
r
I
Untranslating the Anthropocene » Phillip John Usher 69

really aligned with non-Lovecraftian chthonic powers!" The anthropos, Haraway con-
tinues, "is too much of a parochial fellow;' at once "too big and too small for the needed
stories.'' 50 Haraway's fo.tended point is surely not to blame spiders and other species for
global warming-in which case, the ousting of the anthropos surely envisions other time-
lines and futurities, fostering a hope of a different kind of future human and nonhuman
animal communication. If the Chthulucene names the past, it erases how we overpow-
ered the spider; if it names a future, it perhaps denotes a way out of the Anthropocene.
Less than calling for marshaling an understanding of human/nonhuman assemblages
in our analysis, the Chthulucene recalibrates the new era's designation toward futurity.
Along with the Capitalocene and the Chthulucene, we can consider one final term,
Kate Raworth's "Manthropocene," even though it might at first appear a somewhat glib
substitution. In an article in the Guardian, Raworth asked, "Must the Anthropocene Be a
Manthropocene?" She was prompted to ask this question not by an ear for the Greek, but
by the fact that-in a first instance-only one of twenty-nine scientists in the Anthropo-
cene Working Group (AWG) was a woman. This focus on the gender of the observer, and
not the observed, should retain our interest, because-contra the Anthropocene's connec-
tion to anthropology and anthropometry-here the observer is pulled into the category
of the observed. In.other words, the twenty-nine scientists of the AWG, whatever their
sex or gender, are theoretically not part of the group designated by the anthropos of the
term. Pulling them into that group forces observers and observed into the same space.
Taking Raworth's assertions in a different direction, Noah Theriault has underscored the
need to evaluate the manliness of the anthropos by asserting that "feminist approaches
remind us that treating the 'anthropos' of the Anthropocene as an undifferentiated spe-
cies will reproduce the privilege of conventionally unmarked social actors, (i.e., white, cis-
gendered, heterosexual men in the global North).'' 51 Theriault, in line with the main tenets
of climate justice, thus argues that our "epochal moment means different things ontologi-
cally and experientially to different people, and this variation is deeply inflected by social,
geopolitical, and cultural differences." 52 In this he reverts to thinking not about the sex/
gender of the observer, but of the observed: those responsible for creating global warming.

These first attempts at untranslating the Anthropocene leave us with two very dis-
tinct humans, the anthropos and the homo. They are clearly related-to take up a figure
deployed also by Morton and Latour-as if by a Mobius strip, intimately one and not. Even
before we decide to think about the so-called environmental humanities, and whether or
not we are for such a tum, the word "Anthropocene" that defines our era already cries out
for a response from the homo and the humanist-not as saviors or heros, far from it, but
as that human whose name speaks and studies, rather than is spoken of and studied. That
call-for the humanities to take up the Anthropocene-has already issued forth from many
parts, in the work of countless thinkers in the humanities, in the various events orga-
nized at campuses around the United States, especially the University of California, Santa
70 DIACRITICS » 2016 » 44.3

Barbara. That call is also the one that resounds from Roy Scranton's Leaming to Die in the
Anthropocene: "We need a new vision of who 'we' are. We need a new humanism-a newly
philosophical humanism, undergirded by renewed attention to the humanities;' a diagno-
sis that oscillates in good tune with what we have said here." And yet, while introducing
and defining the very concept of the Anthropocene Scranton explains as follows: the use
of the suffix -cene comes from the Greek kain6s, "meaning new"; and then explicates, even
more quickly: "Anthropos means human."54 Such an assertion is, in a sense, meaningless.
Anthropos does not mean human in any simple way. There can be no easy, empirical, fully
resolved, translation of this kind-that is precisely the most urgent task for the homo of the
humanities. The only meaningful route for-
The word 'Anthropocene" that defines our ward is to untranslate the Anthropocene
even further. The anthropos is as strange an
era already cries out for a response from animal, and as wholly bound up in the com-
bat between translatability and untranslat-
the homo and the humanist-not as saviors ability, as is Derrida's rebellious cat that
"refuses to be conceptualized" (rebelle a
or heros, far from it, but as that human tout concept). 55 The point is then: the word
"Anthropocene" already calls out for the
whose name speaks and studies, rather rebellious cat that is the humanist. The
absence of the homo in the Anthropocene
than is spoken of and studied. already calls for its own supplementation,
for the work of the humanist who, in his
homo-ness is also Derrida's cat. We should not return to some fabled idea of "traditional
humanism!' Rather, the homo must strive to reach, conceptually, both the anthropos and
all that we can see the anthropos shutting out when we substitute other terms forit (capi-
tal, Chthulu, etc.). The same point could be made vis-a-vis the Oxford English Diction-
ary, where the word "Anthropocene" was added in June 2014. The OED's definition, in its
entirety, reads: "The era of geological time during which human activity is considered to
be the dominant influence on the environment, climate, and ecology of the earth."" This
is not quite an "Anthropos means human,'' bU.t almost, dangerously almost
 Untranslating the Anthropocene » Phillip John Usher
Notes
Apter, preface to Dictionary of Untranslatables,
edited by Barbara Cassin, x.
2 As Apter has shown both in her preface ta the
Dictionary of Untranslatables and in her Against World
Literature, the Dictionary of Untranslatables belongs to
a long tradltion of encyclopedic undertakings-such
as Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopedie, Andre
Lalande's Vocabulaire technique et cr;tique de philoso-
phie, Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis's
The Language of Psycho-Analysis-but it also differs
from that tradition by the constitutive choice far
multilingualism. Scholars of early modern literature
might well advance that the Dictionary of Untrans-
latables has dose ancestors in the pre-Enlightenment
dictionaries that flourished in sixteenth-century
Europe, most especially perhaps the 1590 Basel
edition of Ambrogio Calepino's Oictionarium, which
plotted the connections between lexemes in Latin and
their relatives in eleven languages, including Hebrew,
Greek, French, Italian, German, and Polish. On
Calepino's dictionary, see Albert Labarre, Bibfiogra-
phie du dictionarium d'A.mbrogio Calepino, and Roy
Rosenstein, 'Jean Nicot's Thresor and Renaissance
Multilingual Lexicography."
3 The most significant work considering decon-
struction in light of the Anthropocene and related
topics is that of Timothy Clark, starting with his article
'Towards a Deconstructive Environmental Criticism,"
and culminating in the variegated essays in the special
issue of Oxford Literary Review, "Deconstruction in
the Anthropocene." More recently, Clark has explored
defining the Anthropocene in Ecocriticism on the
Edge, especially 1-28.
4 · Crutzen and Stoermer first proposed Watt's
invention of the steam engine as the cut-off point in
their 2000 article 'The '.Anthropocene.'" A team of
scientists suggested the 1945 date in 2015, in an article
signed by Jan Zalasiewicz and colleagues in the Anthro-
pocene Working Group, "When Did the Anthropocene
Begin?" Also in 2015, Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin
:~
suggested the 1610 date (baptized the "Orbis hypoth-
esis") in "Defining the Anthropocene," 175.
71
5 Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fres-
soz invent a number of "cenes" in The Shock of the
Anthropocene: the Agnotocene (the "ignorance" or
forgetting of planetary limits), the Phagocene (about
"consuming" the planet), the Polemocene 0ong-term
objecting to the Anthropocene), the Phronocene
('grammars of environmental reflexivity"), the Than-
atocene (ecocide), the Thermocene ("politlcal history
of C01 j. Jussi Parikka fashions the term "Anthrob-
scene" in order to study the "geological underpinnings
of contemporary media culture'' and to "emphasize that
we knew but perhaps shied away from acting on" (The
Anthrobscene, 1, 6). The biologist E. 0. Wilson speaks
of the Eremocene, to capture the solitude of singling
out one species and of that species' negative impact
on biodiversity, in "Beware the Age of Loneliness."
In a tour de force of an introduction to his Shipwreck
Modernity, Steve Mentz explores what he calls, a "'cene
salad" (xiii): a number of additional "cenes" that serve
to challenge, qualify, and give a voice to the muted and
dumb agency of "Old Man Anthropos" (xiv). Mentz's
critically barking other-cenes are three in number:
(a) the Homogenocene, which relates a "future of
sameness" and a "world without heroes" (xvii); (b) the
Thalassocene, defined not as an "epochal designation"
but as the "pressure [that] the inhuman ocean exerts
on all histories" (xix)-thls is dearly the most important
"cene" for the book; and (c), which is something of
an outgrowth of the former and the most·interest-
ing to say out loud(!), the Naufragocene. I discuss
Mentz's contributed "cenes" in my "Mentz's Shipwreck
Modernity." In her "Must the Anthropocene Be a
M.3.nthropocener and in various Twitter posts, Kate
Raworth evokes the "Northropocene," to emphasize
the lack of representation of members in the Anthro-
pocene Working Group (AWG) from outside the
OECD and the "Manthropocene" (discussed below).
Donna Haraway recalls that "in a recorded conversa-
tion for Ethnos at the University of Aarhus in October,
2014, the participants collectively generated the name
Plantationocene for the devastating transformations of
the diverse kinds of human-tended farms, pastures, and
forests into extractive and enclosed plantations, relying
on slave labor and other forms of exploited, alie~ated, ·
72
and usually spatially transported labor" (:Anthropocene,
Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene,n 162n5).
6 Crepon and de Launay, "Menschheit,
humanitat," in Cassin, Dictionary of Untranslatabfes,
650-53.
7 Martin Thomas, ''.Anthropology and the British
Empire,n 255; Osamu, 'l\nthropos and Humanitas,n
260; emphasis mine.
8 Such a description is dearly an oversimplifica-
tion, albeit (I think) a useful one in the present context.
9 Osamu, ''.Anthropos and Humanitas,n 263.
10 Esperanza, ~Judging Books by Their Cover.n She
is also quoted in Dori Tunstall, "Rebranding Anthro-
pology Textbooks." Tunstall details her efforts, working
with Esperanza and others, to decolonize anthropol-
ogy, so as to render its anthropos not-exotic. She
describes in particular a project, in collaboration with
Julie Hill, in which she sought out alternate images for
the covers of anthropology textbooks, around themes
such as "Beauty Clay," "Body Modification," "Danc-
ing," "Market," "Nubile Women."
11 Mabanckou, Memoires de pore-epic, 142;
translation mine.
12 Morton, Dark Ecology, 19.
13 Chakrabarty, "Postcolonial Studies and the
Challenge of Climate Change," 14.
14 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed.,
s.v. "anthropometry."
15 Steffen, Grinevald, Crutzen, and McNeill, "The
Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspec-
tives," 851-52.
16 Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology
a~e< the End of the World.
17 Marton expands the quip: "I'm the detective and
the criminal! I'm a person. I'm also part of an entity
DIACRITICS » 2016 » 44.3
that is now a geophysical force on a planetary scale!
The darkness of ecological awareness is the dark-
ness of noir, which is a strange loop: the detective is
a criminal. In a strong version of noir the narrator is
implicated in the story: two levels that normally don't
cross, that some believe structurally can't cross. We
'civilized' people, we Mesopotamians, are the narrators
of our destiny. Ecological awareness is that moment at
which these narrators Find out that they are the tragic
criminar (Dark Ecology, 9).
18 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 1, 3-5;
Latour, "Life among Conceptual Characters," 474.
19 LSJ: The Online Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek-
English Lexicon, s.v. CivBpwnoc;.
20 Prost, 'The Complex Architecture of Humanitas
in Latin Humanisin," in Cassin, Dictionary of Untrans-
latables, 651.
21 Latour's Great Divide is somewhat more com-
plex that I summarize here. See in particular Latour,
We Have Never Been Modern, 1-12, but also (For relat-
ing the internal and external Great Divides) 97-100.
22 Terence, The Self-Tormentor, line 77; my transla-
tion. For Montaigne's inclusion of this quotation on
one of the beams of his librairie, see Legros, Essais sur
poutres, 339-40. On Augustine's use of this quotation
(letter 155), see Jenkins, ':.C..ugustine's Classical Quota-
tions in His Letters," 65.
23 Osamu, "Anthropos and Humanitas," 260.
24 Jacquet, "The Anthropocebo Effect," 898.
25 Quentin Meillassoux defines "correlation" as
"the idea according to which we only ever have access
t? the correlation between thinking and being, and
never to either term considered apart from the other"
and correlationism as a process by which is dis-
qualified any "claim that it is possible to consider the
realms of subjectivity and objectivity independently
of one another" (After Finitude, s). It is worth noting
that Morton is something of a correlationist malgre /ui:
 Untranslating the Anthropocene » Phillip John Usher
"The finitude is drastic because it is irreducible. I can't
burt through it" (Dark Ecology, 16).
26 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 13.
' 27 Aravamudan, ~The Catachrbnism of Climate
Change," 15.
28 Chakrabarty, 'The Climate of History: Four
Theses," 201.
29 For a glimpse at the complexity of homo and
related terms, see Christopher Celenza, "Humanism";
Vito Giustiniani, "Homo, Humanus, and the Meanings
of 'Humanism"'; Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine,
From Humanism to the Humanities; Paul Kristeller,
Renaissance Thought, 3-23, and "Humanism"; as well
as Nicholas Mann, "The Origins of Humanism." I
also unpack the term humanism in more depth in the
introduction to my forthcoming On the Exterrane~n.
30 Gouwens, "What Posthumanism Isn't," 38.
31 Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, xi and xvi.
32 Gouwens, "What Posthumanism Isn't," 39.
Wolfe's use of the terms uhuman" and "humanism"
is still central in his interview with Natasha Lennard,
"Is Humanism Really Humane?" published as part of
Simon Critchley's series "The Stone" in the New York
Times, to which I respond in my blog post "Wrong
Question: Is Humanism Humane?"
33 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 71-73.
34 On these questions, including the history of how
Pica's text came to be seen as~ celebration of human
exceptionalism rather than a text about the extinc-
tion of self before the divine, see the concise and
convincing section titled "Renaissance Conceptions
of Human Dignity and Misery" in Gouwens, "What
Posthumanism Isn't." 44-49.
35 Michel de Montaigne, Essays, 330; translation
modified; Essais, 452. Montaigne continues as follows,
to situate humanity at the lowest level of the sea/a
73
naturae: "[This creature] sees itself lodged here, amid
the mire and dung of the world, nailed and riveted to
the worst, the deadest, and the most stagnant part of
the universe, on the lowest story of the house and the
farthest from the vault of heaven, with the animals of
the worst condition of the three; and in its imagination
it goes planting itself above the circle of the moon, and
bringing the sky down beneath his feet." (Elle se sent et
se void logE!e icy, parmy la bourbe et le fient du monde,
attachee et douee a la pire, plus morte et croupie partie
de l'univers, au demier estage du logis et le plus esloigne
de la voute celeste, avec !es animaux de la pire condition
des trois; et se va plantant par imagination au dessus du
cercle de la Lune et ramenant le ciel soubs ses pieds)
(Essays, 330-31; translation modified; Essais, 452).
36 This example, taken from an issue of Epheme-
rides du citoyen, ou Chronique de /'esprit national 1, no.
16 (December 27, 1765): 246-47, is quoted by Giustini-
ani, "Homo, Humanus, and the Meanings of 'Human-
ism,"' 17Sn38. In French: "cette vertu qui n'a point de
nom parmi nous O'amour general de l'humanite) que
nous oserions appeler humanisme, puisqu'enfin ii est
temps de creer un mot pour une chose si belle, si
necessaire." The author's use of the verb oser (to risk,
to dare) surely captures the term's perceived novelty.
37 Giustiniani, "Homo, Humanus, and the Mean-
ings of 'Humanism,'" 178.
38 Osborne, introduction to "Vocabulary of Euro-
pean Philosophie~, Part 1," 9.
39 This is Crutzen's account as related by Fred
Pearce in With Speed and Violence, 21.
40 Crutzen and Stoermer, "The 'Anthropocene,"' 41.
Stoppani develops the idea of the "anthropozoic" era
throughout his Corso di geologia. On Stoppani's prop-
osition from the point of view of the Anthropocene,
see his "First Period of Anthropozoic Era,~ introduced
by Etienne Turpin and Valeria Federighi and translated
by Federighi, titled ''A New Element, A New Force, A
New lnPut: Antonio Stoppani's Anthropozoic."
74
41 Stoermer began using the word ''.A.nthropocene"
in the 1990s, but it was Crutzen's subsequent and
seemingly unconnected fabrication thereof, in the
year 1000, that is the true starting point, as Stoermer
0 Change." diacritics 41, no. 3 (2013): 6-30.
never formalized" the term until Crutzen contacted
him (Grinevald, La biosphere de l'Anthrapocene, 243).
42 Crutzen and Stoermer, "The J:i.nthropocene.'"
17; emphasis mine.
43 One of the few occurrences of the term
"Homocene" is in Bernard Marcus, Evolution That
Anyone Can Understand, 9.
44 Ziiek, Living in the End Times, 331.
45 Crist, "On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature," 23.
46 Morton, Dark Ecology, 23.
47 Haraway, "Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plan-
tationocene, Chthulucene," 159. 1 quote here mainly
from Haraway's earliest essay on the Chthulucene.
She has developed these ideas further in "Staying with
the Trouble: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulu-
cene," as well as in her book Staying with the Trouble:
Making Kin in the Chthulucene.
48 Haraway, "Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Planta-
tionocene, Chthulucene," 160.
49 Haraway, "Staying with the Trouble," 62n7.
so Ibid.
51 Theriault, "Gendering the Anthropocene," par. 6.
52 Ibid.
53 Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, 19.
54 Ibid., 17.
55 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 9. See
also Jacques Lezra, "The Animal in Translation."
S6 OED, 3rd ed, s.v. 'J\nthropocene, n. and adj."
DIACRITICS » 2016 » 44.3
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