HOMO COMPLEXUS: THE “HISTORICAL FUTURE” OF COMPLICITY

NITZAN LEBOVIC

Iterations, series 1: Historical Futures, edited by Zoltán Boldizsár Simon and Marek Tamm

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.”

Image: by Ron Lach (19 May 2021)