immanence

I just sent in my abstract for the Aarhus University conference The Garden and the Dump: Across More-than-Human Entanglements. Other speakers include Tim Morton, Michael Marder, and Chinese science fiction writer Chen Qiufan. The conference, which is open to all, will take place online on September 15 and 16. Further information here. (I like the Bosch imagery, which I’ve also been using in talks and on my FB page recently.)

Here is my abstract:

Event, Time, Trauma: Perambulations in and around the Anthropocenic Zone

The Anthropocene, or the Anthro-Colonial-Capitalocene (ACCene, for short), is not a time so much as it is a Zone, which enfolds and circles around the Hyper-Event of climate trauma. We humans are positioned at various stages in relation to this Event: pre-traumatic (for those who have managed to shelter themselves so far), becoming-traumatic (for those facing loss of shelter and bearings in a readily imaginable future), already-traumatic (for current refugees, both physical and existential), and continuously-post-traumatic (for those for whom this merely continues centuries of world-destroying trauma). How we engage with these layers of the Zone will dictate how successfully we might navigate through it. I propose three temporal paths for engaging this relationship: Chronos, or the time of causal determination (and fatedness to pass); Aion, or the time of imaginative constitution (and fatedness to meaning); and Kairos, or presence to rupture (and fatedness to act).