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Seeing the World: Visions of Being in the Anthropocene

Abstract:This essay excavates the “spherical” and “global” ontological optics that have emerged from Martin Heidegger's thought considered in the context of the whole earth image and global climate change, focusing on the work of Timothy Ingold and Timothy Morton. Probing the boundaries of Morton's perspective in particular, I show how his global vision of Being ultimately reinscribes a fundamentally anthropocentric position in which the human “interior” is privileged and universalized while the inhuman “exterior” is either violently incorporated or altogether rejected. I then propose an alternative vision of Being, one which avows a planetary optics while simultaneously emphasizing the unseen and unknown roiling beyond the boundaries of both spherical and global perspectives. I conclude by suggesting that this alternative vision can begin to be cultivated through attending to the works of Georges Bataille, whom a growing host of contemporary theorists have begun to identify as a resource for an ecological perspective that negotiates both the articulation and the transgression of the ontological and perspectival limits that separate the anthropocentric interior and the inhuman exterior. Bataille's exorbitant vision of Being sublates the dialectic of spherical and global perspectives, joining a consciousness of the limits of earth-bound human seeing-being to the ecstatic experience of a dynamic planet in the midst of an unfathomable cosmos.