HOMO COMPLEXUS: THE “HISTORICAL FUTURE” OF COMPLICITY

Abstract

The moment in which we live proposes a staggering new challenge to past, present, and future understanding of our existence: climate change in general, and the Anthropocene in particular, requires a recalibration of all temporal relationships. In this article, I propose to identify the agent of change with current forms of complicity, or, as I call it in the title to this piece, the Homo complexus. A focus on complicity, I will argue, suggests that any future analysis of our society will recognize a short-term investment in a threat hovering above different forms of existence, or a new "sense of an ending."

TRUE NORTH*

“…facts, present critique, and future judgment, or long-term considerations of any sort." 26 Lebovic is right to point us toward complicity as the key to understanding the short-term and self-serving decisions that seem ubiquitous, but I am less convinced that presentism is the problem. Or, rather, what Lebovic and François Hartog call "presentism" I would call "defuturing" and "de-pasting," leaving only one possible future based on an equally limited past.…”