Chakrabarty – humanist historians in the face of CC : question for him
Il va falloir que j’institue ce nouveau signe : CC for climate change, GIEC / IPCC (just learning the vocab, a rapid education with D. Chakrabarty, who has done the work – working out how to “converge” the “three disciplines: geology, archaeology, and history”, Climate of History 42 – over the last decade).
La grâce notée hier – morphée rapidement en impatience. Sweetness, and the plenty of good will to let himself be educated (by Earth science and its unreconstructed epistemologies – here at p. 42) – leaving the capacity to turn to interrogate “scholars of the Left” and anticapitalist critique of globalization so apparently lightly (there’s sure to have been, to be, theoretical and disciplinaire drama here, and a process of self-uprooting, undeniable, yet) after rooting work initially on the (Australian-located) spot of subaltern studies. A “humanist” soft core, resourcing for the project of “deep history” (deepening history from modern “humanist” to “deep”, geological – “species” proposed as reconsideration of “personhood” (!? où en était donc la théorisation du sujet politique ? Je me rappelle mal des termes de Provincializing Europe, il faudra sans doute aller reprendre la température méthodologique, conceptuelle, là). Notable resource in philosophy – Arendt, Schmitt, Jaspers. Surprising unconvincing discussion of historiographical history in intro, shallow, it feels – Vico-Hobbes (where the Hobbes?), Collingwood, Carr – even including Braudel for a longer slower look. Relevance of this line to the river of issues and models? In trying to problematise a dissociation of natural and cultural times in historical thinking. The 1st Thesis formulates thus: anthropogenetic explanations “spell the collapse of the Humanist distinction between natural history and human history“. Short indeed. For a massive interrogation, with long and classic strands of debates already.
So one point at which to broach a question : how, why, this insistent location within “humanist” space ? As self-conscious spacialization in a map of the Two Cultures, in front and some awe of Earth system science? In front of “scholars of the Left“? An issue of disciplines – with disciplinary geography as … parameter? (conceptual elaboration, ongoing in the original & programmatic essay “Four Theses” around the question of boundaries, “planetary boundaries” – “that humans should not breach”, now envisaged or called for in ecology science – cf note p. 238, J. Rockström 2009 ; “parameters” as a category critical of “institutions” (cf 41) ; conditions of the history of life … 💬.
University-bound view, with the curiously in-place, valid, “normal-science” map of departments and disciplines (see Acknowledgements – even if that’s so entirely fairplay on my part). Even as the questions of “the sociology of knowledge” are raised and explicitly situated on the working horizon, at a distance (14 : a rapid and sweetly unaggressive swipe at “science studies”, “in Bernard Williams’s words, ‘the remarkable assumption that the sociology of knowledge is in a better position to deliver the truth about science than science is to deliver the truth about the world”).
Interrogating history, as tool of modernity even when extending to embrace prehistory and “deep history” (the Historical depth of 19th century intellectual history – Darwin, geology, explosion of Biblical history, including linguistic forays into anthropological time : the depth and maximum Altertum of human culture, and not only geo-biology). Will require a institutional – not “only” “specist” – decentring of history in its humanist plinth.
The university (which !?) and the Humanities, strangely valid and solid here. And the IPCC institution and all its types. To be included in the reconsidering. Reappraisal of the position “scholars on the Left”, one necessary step. This will include an ex-post rehistoricisation of the subalternist stance.
There will only be institutions to turn humanity to a life-change, or war and flightless, possibly faceless ( incapacité à qualifier les agences) oppression.
Quelles reprises des Two Cultures? And how relevant ?? (Latour invoqué ici ; Hayles Simondon McLuhan récemment visités. Anthropologies fondamentales, culture et nature. Ces lignes – Stengers certainement 💬)
Question for him : what of the humanist stance? And self-consciousness while, or as, working from academia : how to re-institutionalize?
C’est-à-dire : cet “universel négatif”, est-il un Inconnu (ou même un Impossible) posant des questions métaphysiques, ou un inconnu épistémologique, critique, à composer ? Question de … nature, ontologique (de redistribution ontologique, peut-être), ou question de savoir – soit de travail ? Le regarder comme un Inconnu, ou comment un programme à ? Un concept manque, ou un être/la saisie d’un être ? Question pour l’Homme ou question pour l’université, et l’historien ?
La question est présente dans ces derniers paragraphes du chapitre – sous la forme (appui sur l’Adorno tardif, lui aussi en fin de trajectoire de post-marxisme) de : éthique seulement pour le moment :
The “negative universal history” of the Anthropocene – the history that gestures to a “we” that may indeed be more than human – can only be an ethical advisory at this point. Its empirical content for now remains necessarily empty. … something like Karl Jasper’s “epochal consciousness” (is what we can hope for at this stage) … It may someday be possible to fill out the “we” of a negative universal history of the Anthropocene with concrete identities of humans and nonhumans. Or it may not. (48)
Question de départ, “provincializing Europe” right mais aussi “les peuples sans histoire“. Ici une vraie continuation, avec un saut de dimension. Ce qui fait que la question est, ou atteint, en effet quelque chose de très autre. À reconsidérer. Espèces sans histoire, sans (mais avec pourtant) agence ? (=> le projet subalterniste, dans sa pratique tout cas, était déjà une morale ? Du supplément aux ici du privilège ? Je connais ce désir. Encore une fois peut-être : désir épistémologique, ou moral ?)
👉 now : supplement (52, chapitre 2, “Conjointed Times”). Notion dérridéenne, outils (ou mythe conceptuel) d’ontologie négative. Tropisme philosophique, et même explicitement “phénoménologique”, de ces réorientations au-delà des “insufficient instruments in helping us to come to grips with the historical significance of anthropogenic climate change”, fournis classiquement par “the analytics of capital (or of the market)”.
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Claire Joubert (26 décembre 2021). Chakrabarty – humanist historians in the face of CC : question for him. Ce que fait un angliciste. Consulté le 25 avril 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/n9uv