TEMPORALIZATION, HISTORICAL SELF-UNDERSTANDING, AND ERASURE OF THE FUTURE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE AN ETHICAL POLITICAL REFLECTION FROM KOSELLECK AND FOUCAULT

The essay aims to analyze some difficulties in thinking ethics and politics for the future starting from the characteristics of the temporal and historical discourse order of Modernity. The starting point is the analysis of the name/concept of Anthropocene, a new geological era in which the human becomes a geological force, and the specific temporality that it shows: the need to think beyond the division between "human history" and "natural history". In order to define the limits of the order of temporal and historical discourse in Modernity, I questioned Reinhart Koselleck's reflection and Michel Foucault. If it is true that, reasoning with and beyond Koselleck, Modernity seems structurally incapable of thinking the future as radically different from an extension of the present; it is equally true that Modernity itself, thought of as ethos and not as epoch, can point the way to a form of critique of all existent reality as an ontology of actuality and a dimension of care towards exploited human living, non-human living, and Earth system.