Rupture and Letting Go

Clive Hamilton (Charles Sturt University)

Abstract for Clive Hamilton's lecture "Rupture and Letting Go":

In this lecture I will offer some speculations on the implications of the Anthropocene as rupture—a break in geological history and in human history. The ‘earth’ always remains unfathomable and uncontrollable, warned Heidegger, despite our determination to ‘enframe’ it with technological thinking. The world ‘grounds itself on the earth’ and provides the setting for meaningful action; yet a world coming to an end seems to lose meaning.

Letting go of comforting continuities rooted in past events is hard. Writing the Anthropocene into the continuity of history (as concepts like ‘Capitalocene’ do) is a way of taking control of the event, concealing the unprecedented nature of the epoch, and clinging to hope. Geoengineering schemes too are imagined as ways of harnessing the Earth back into the world of control, using technology to rescue history from the Anthropocene abyss. Discomforting as they are, certain popular trends are responding to the realisation of the Anthropocene as rupture, perhaps foreshadowing the end, and theology is wondering whether ‘eschatology’, thinking from the future rather than about the future, can help.