The current epoch is often described by cultural theorists as facing an ontological turn with regard to the question of nature. In the Anthropocene, ‘Mother Nature’ makes space for ‘Gaia’, a nature that is inseparably related to culture. In turn, Gaia has vehemently been criticized as a harmonious figure of whole-ism. Utilizing a psychoanalytic framework, this paper traces the shift from Nature to Gaia through Jacques Lacan's ‘formulas of sexuation’. From a Lacanian standpoint, sexual difference paves the way towards two (...) different ways of relating nature and culture. Addressing the case of ruination, the author engages with the two underlying ontologies taking place in debates on nature: the narrative of Mother Nature based on a ‘masculine’ ontology, and the notion of Gaia as following a ‘feminine’ ontology. The paper concludes by outlining a feminine reading of the Anthropocene that captures nature and culture as ruined and immanently out of joint. (shrink)

Entwining the disciplines of philosophy and architecture, this essay proceeds from an account of the Anthropocene and its dark promise of a foreclosed human future toward the speculative gesture of feminist futures, with a focus on feminist architectural practices. To reflect on the ‘storms of progress’ that have issued in the Anthropocene Walter Benjamin’s famous angel of history is complemented with Bruno Latour’s more recent formulation of an angel of geohistory. Each angel posits the question of what is to be (...) done in the aftermath of the destructions the Anthropos has wrought on a global scale, leaving behind the graffiti-like signature of human industrial toil in the very material geological constitution of the planet’s surface while altering its enclosing atmosphere. While each angel flees the material destructions of human progress they are at the same time confronted with what Isabelle Stengers calls the intrusion of Gaia, a mythical figure who cares little for human history. Drawing to a conclusion the essay ventures the speculative gesture of a feminist future and how this can be supported through feminist practices, specifically in architecture. Such a future does not seek to overcome, to escape or to flee, but as Donna Haraway would have it, to stay with the trouble, to work assiduously from the midst of the situations in which we find ourselves. (shrink)

The Anthropocene marks a moment of wild destratification of the planet that requires analysis of the relations between geologic forces and social practices. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of strata is examined in order to develop a geophilosophy for the Anthropocene. Establishing a model of strata that conjoins earth and social flows together into planes of interrelated production highlights how the fossil substratum subtends contemporary forms of social relations. Stratifications, it is argued, are planes of social reproduction that both constrain and (...) are expressive of possible modes of expression. If power, according to Foucault, is a relation between forces, geosocial strata conceptualizes how stratifications organize and capture forces into political geology. Concentrating on diagramming moments of crossing strata, it is suggested that Anthropocene geopolitics needs to be located at the intersection of geosocial formations and processes of fossilization, rather than through a new assemblage of planetary scale. (shrink)

This article elucidates the spatial order that underpins the politics of the Anthropocene – the ecological nomos of the earth – and criticizes its imperial origins and legacies. It provides a critical reading of Carl Schmitt’s spatial thought to not only illuminate the spatio-political ontology but also the violence and usurpations that characterize the Anthropocene condition. The article first shows how with the emergence of the ecological nomos seemingly ‘natural’ spaces like the biosphere and the atmosphere became politically charged. This (...) challenges the modernist separation between natural facts and political norms. It then underlines the imperial origins of this nomos by introducing the concept of air-appropriation understood as the colonization of atmospheric space by CO2 emissions. Instead of assuming that the ecological nomos represents a transition from a colonial to an ecological and cosmopolitan world order, focusing on air-appropriation highlights forms of ecological imperialism that go along with the new nomos. Accordingly, the article calls for a just redistribution of ecospace that takes into account the imperial legacies and ongoing effects of air-appropriation. (shrink)