Monika Rogowska-Stangret: Exhaustion and Scale in the Anthropocene

Center for Environmental and Technology Ethics WEBSITE

Abstract
Anthropocene may be aptly framed as an epoch of exhaustion of bodies-environments. Violence, (self)exploitation, harm and damage happen simultaneously in different registers and at various scales. Exhausted are ways of thinking and imagining the world, human bodies and communities, as well as more-than-human lives, life-death dynamics, and planetary systems or boundaries. To grasp this omnipresent exhaustion that oftentimes goes beyond what the humans can relate to through their sensory apparatus, I suggest to rethink the notion of scale and challenge its stabilized connotations. This paper, thus, develops the concept of “cross-scale ethics” in which scale functions as produced and productive apparatus with ethico-political stakes. “Cross-scale ethics” is here conceptualized together with feminist new materialist and critical posthumanist theories and notions to seek together answers to the three main questions. What insights on exhaustion today can be gained from cross-scale ethical perspective? How exhausted bodies-environments are made and unmade across scales and to what effects? What cross-scale cracks appear in this overwhelming vision of exhaustion that could lessen the firm grip of exhaustion on human narratives and imaginaries?

Monika Rogowska-Stangret is a philosopher conducting research at the intersection of feminist philosophy, environmental humanities, and critical posthumanism, and a translator. She works as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Cognitive Studies, University of Białystok. She is now the Principal Investigator of the project Anthropocene Ethics. Redefining the Concept of the Human in Posthuman Philosophy funded by the National Science Center, Poland. She published in, among others, Feminist Theory, Philosophy Today, The Minnesota Review: A Journal of Creative and Critical Writing. She is the author of Ciało – poza innością i tożsamością. Trzy figury ciała w filozofii współczesnej [The Body – Beyond Otherness and Sameness. Three Figures of the Body in Contemporary Philosophy] (Gdańsk 2016, 2019) as well as Być ze świata. Cztery eseje o etyce posthumanistycznej [Be of the World. Four Essays on the Posthuman Ethics] (Gdańsk 2021). She is the editor-in-chief of Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research.