Anthropocene scholars push a new universal history and subject: we (the “anthropos”) are digging our grave as a species. Though this rhetoric is effective for drawing attention to the ecological crisis, the Anthropocene concept is dangerous for social theory. By generalizing responsibility and guilt for our contemporary ecological crisis to the point that it encompasses the human species, the concept and discourse elide the particular people and structures responsible for creating it. Rather than clarify the origins of the contemporary crisis—the history of capitalism, colonialism, and simplistic ideas about nature—it occludes them through forays into “deep history” and tales of technology disembedded from their social context. Lacking this history, the Anthropocene operates as an empty cosmopolitanism. Rather than provide a ground for a new political ecology, the Anthropocene removes it. Worse, the concept may prove useful for global actors who wish to hide their climate debts, using the rhetoric of collective responsibility that the Anthropocene makes possible.
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Castoriadis’s analysis here is an updated version of the assessment of Russian society that had been developed within Socialisme ou Barbarie. Castoriadis makes a compelling argument that Russia had regenerated itself into a full-blown stratocracy, armed to the teeth and yet still unable to provide its citizens with a functional civic bureaucracy; a decade later he reflects that a core argument of “Facing the War” was that brute force had become the sole signification holding this society together. Castoriadis’s argument operates at two levels: as a political analysis of Russian bureaucratic spheres (the comparison of military capacity between superpowers and a critique of rational determinism within the justification of Cold War strategy—i.e., M.A.D.); and as a political judgement of the imaginary significations that served to orient Russian society. It is through the latter level that lessons on historical contingency are astutely relevant to the contemporary world situation. It seems that a young internet highflier who calls himself “the Argonaut,” whose idée fixe is the future of the European Union, has become the champion of a possible Federalist European Union and is bombarding the network with a number of miracles that, according to him, are being achieved in Brussels and Strasbourg. He claims that Europe’s political unification is fully realized, that the ECB has extended quantitative easing to all European banks, that the Greek problem, he happily announces, is solved thanks to a giant issue of fifty-year Greek government real estate bonds, which are sending the international financial market agog. The EU Commission, the Argonaut dreams, has decided to support the British suggestion that the EU MPs should work inside various 28 national parliaments, thus integrating the European institutions, and not in Strasbourg; he moreover says that the Frontex Immigrant Agency in Warsaw, duly instructed by Germany, has accepted enthusiastically to coordinate the Mediterranean immigrants distribution among the EU member states who heartedly agree. His most fantastic declaration is that five EU defense ministers of Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Great Britain, based on articles 28, 42, and 43 of the Lisbon Treaty, have created the EEF, an European Expeditionary Force, which will be based in Sardinia and near Cracow. Special arrangements, he candidly assures the social network, have already been signed with NATO. At the Great War Fiction blog, George Simmers reviews Ernst Jünger’s Sturm, now available from Telos Press. You can purchase your copy in our online store, and save 20% with the coupon code BOOKS20. |
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“Facing the War” is a translation from the first section of Devant la guerre, Cornelius Castoriadis’s least regarded work within English-speaking circles. The reason for this marginalization is its central claim that Russian society had transformed into a stratocratic regime, with increased probability for an escalation into a Third World War. Castoriadis’s critics claimed he had missed signs of perestroika and glasnost already on the horizon. Viewed from this perspective, history could not have been more cruel to Castoriadis. However, the value of his work does not depend on a predictive mode of political analysis, a point that is clearly prefaced in this work: calls for predictive accuracy ignore the radical character of historical contingency. In fact, the unexpected events put into motion later by Gorbachev only strengthen Castoriadis’s perspective in the sense that such a development represents the deeper problem of historical indeterminacy, and it is in this respect that his analysis is finely tuned to any society’s condition of historical contingency. 
