The Plasticity of the Earth. For a plastic reading of temporality in the Anthropocene epoch

Abstract

The realisation of the fragile state of the Earth – brought about by the current environmental crisis – has forced us to become aware of the impact that we humans have on the Earth’s ecosystem. It is now increasingly accepted that we are in a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene, in which human beings have become a telluric or geological force. This prompts us to question what it means that the human being (a part of the Earth’s biosphere) has become so strong as to affect the Earth’s equilibrium and its impact so long-lasting as to access deep time. It is a clash of temporalities that Malabou addresses in the essay The Brain of History, or The Mentality of the Anthropocene and which is the starting point of our analysis aimed at understanding whether the concept of plasticity can once again be a driving scheme to understand the perceptual crisis that the Anthropocene poses to us and what a possible path to overcome the environmental crisis in which we participate might be.