Practicing for Death in the Anthropocene

Abstract

This article analyzes the theme of practicing for death as it has emerged in recent environmental discourse. In the first part, it situates Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (2015) in the context of new critical approaches to death and asceticism, especially Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics (2013). In the second part, it offers an environmental reading of the “remembrance of death” as it appears in John Climacus’s influential seventh-century manual, The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Here, the authors build on Sloterdijk’s remarks on Climacus while developing Sloterdijk’s analysis substantially, drawing (in part three) on ecotheological readings of Byzantine asceticism to elucidate Climacus’s environmental practice. The authors argue that what is at stake in the remembrance of death is the death not of the self but of a perception of the self that valorizes the self-possessed subject. In the final part, they compare the death of specific self-images in Christian asceticism to the death of the human qua self-possessed subject in the posthumanist ethics of Rosi Braidotti. At the same time, the authors see Climacus as deepening positions sketched out in Braidotti’s posthumanism and providing a critical perspective on the idea of resigning from care.