Abstract

This paper aims to think the Anthropocene from a perspective that goes beyond geological questions of periodisation, but one that also challenges and places into question a wide range of contemporary thinkers and discourses, including anthropology and philosophy. In so doing a vocabulary is introduced that crosses contemporary science and cosmological thought, and that responds to a neologism invented by Claude Lévi-Strauss, when, in the final pages ofTristes Tropiques, the celebrated anthropologist claimed that rather than anthropology, we should refer to entropology. There are many links between Lévi-Strauss’ entropology and the geological period that since 2000 we call the Anthropocene, about which the following pages try to show the necessity of preparing our escape, into what might therefore be called the Neganthropocene. This means revisiting the questions of entropy and negentropy from a perspective that is not simply scientific. Conversely, for reasons that stem from and contest Lévi-Strauss’ perspective, this involves moving from anthropology to a neganthropology that takes as essential the technical dimension of life and the use of tools to construct artificial environments whose function is to stave off entropy.