Mathias Thaler: “Repetition in Action: The Problem of Human Agency in the Anthropocene”

ABSTRACT:

One of the most perplexing aspects of life on a climate-changed planet concerns the status of human action. As Donna Haraway observes, we appear to be stuck between a rock and a hard place: on the hand, there is the “position that the game is over, it’s too late, there’s no sense trying to make anything any better” and, on the other side, we encounter “the comic faith in technofixes”. In this paper, my goal is to investigate how we might overcome this persistent stalemate and recover a type of action that is properly adjusted to the exigencies of the climate emergency. Building on Sharon Krause’s re-conceptualization of nonsovereign, normatively inflected agency, I shall demonstrate that a critical turn to Søren Kierkegaard’s discussion of repetition provides valuable resources for precisely such an endeavour. “Repetition” here means, surprisingly, the complete opposite of business as usual. Rather, Kierkegaard’s thoughts reveal a mode of acting that allows us to get the world back at the very moment when all seems lost. Paradoxically, this only becomes an option once an agent forsakes the pretence of control and mastery over their environment. The paper suggests that this complex notion of agency, and the attendant conception of existential attunement (via faith, resignation, hope and anxiety), is best suited for navigating the disconcerting reality of the Anthropocene.