Nel tempo della fine. Storia, politica e Antropocene in Latour e Chakrabarty

This essay takes into account the conceptual nexus between history, politics, and critique established by two major theorists of the Anthropocene: Bruno Latour and Dipesh Chakrabarty. It is argued that despite important theoretical differences between their reflections, they both find the Anthropocene to have disruptive effects on human possibilities to comprehend and criticize history. On the one hand, for Latour the discovery of Gaia brings about a new geo-history which allows us to both ‘disinvent’ old historical categories, and favor the political composition of a new order. Chakrabarty, on the other hand, finds in the Anthropocene the key to a new ‘negative universal history’ that makes the ‘evolutionary’ history of the species crucial for a critical understanding of the present. Finally, the way Latour and Chakrabarty utilize the concepts of ‘class’ and ‘population’ is used to draw conclusions on their conceptualization of political ecology.